Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Datadog
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
Datadog is a monitoring service for IT, Dev and Ops teams who write and run applications at scale, and want to turn the massive amounts of data produced by their apps, tools and services into actionable insight.
$18
per month per host
Grafana
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
Grafana is a data visualization tool developed by Grafana Labs in New York. It is available open source, managed (Grafana Cloud), or via an enterprise edition with enhanced features. Grafana has pluggable data source model and comes bundled with support for popular time series databases like Graphite. It also has built-in support for cloud monitoring vendors like Amazon Cloudwatch, Microsoft Azure and SQL databases like MySQL. Grafana can combine data from many places into a single dashboard.
$0
Pricing
DatadogGrafana
Editions & Modules
Log Management
$1.27
per month (billed annually) per host
Infrastructure
$15.00
per month (billed annually) per host
Standard
$18
per month per host
Enterprise
$27
per month per host
DevSecOps Pro
$27
per month per host
APM
$31.00
per month (billed annually) per host
DevSecOps Enterprise
$41
per month per host
Grafana Cloud - Pro
$8
per month up to 1 active user
Grafana Cloud - Free
Free
10k metrics + 50GB logs + 50GB traces up to 3 active users
Grafana Cloud - Advanced
Volume Discounts
custom data usage custom active users
Grafana - Enterprise Stack
Custom Pricing
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
DatadogGrafana
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
YesYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalNo setup fee
Additional DetailsDiscount available for annual pricing. Multi-Year/Volume discounts available (500+ hosts/mo).
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
DatadogGrafana
Considered Both Products
Datadog
Chose Datadog
Dynatrace was cheaper but, in my opinion, its setup, features, and overall user experience do not come close to what Datadog can offer, making it more of a pain to use and not worth the cheaper cost over Datadog (especially if migrating away from Datadog to Dynatrace).

Grafana/…
Chose Datadog
Better performance and visibility than what I was able to obtain out of AppDynamics

Their OnCall offering is very fresh still, but is already almost at parity with Splunk On Call (VictorOps)
Chose Datadog
It's a one-stop solution for all our needs whereas in other open-source tools, we have an operational overhead to keep and manage the uptime of these tools as well and also manage their versioning, upgrade, and patching cycle. Also if there are any bugs then we have to raise an …
Grafana
Chose Grafana
Grafana has a direct plugin to Icinga monitoring solution and allowed for easy configuration for us. At the time of implementation, other services did not have such an integration. As we already had a very customized and heavily introduced monitoring solution in place, we …
Features
DatadogGrafana
BI Standard Reporting
Comparison of BI Standard Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Datadog
-
Ratings
Grafana
8.0
5 Ratings
5% below category average
Pixel Perfect reports00 Ratings6.05 Ratings
Customizable dashboards00 Ratings10.05 Ratings
Report Formatting Templates00 Ratings8.05 Ratings
Ad-hoc Reporting
Comparison of Ad-hoc Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Datadog
-
Ratings
Grafana
6.8
4 Ratings
16% below category average
Drill-down analysis00 Ratings6.14 Ratings
Formatting capabilities00 Ratings8.04 Ratings
Integration with R or other statistical packages00 Ratings5.14 Ratings
Report sharing and collaboration00 Ratings8.04 Ratings
Report Output and Scheduling
Comparison of Report Output and Scheduling features of Product A and Product B
Datadog
-
Ratings
Grafana
8.4
4 Ratings
0% below category average
Publish to Web00 Ratings7.14 Ratings
Publish to PDF00 Ratings9.04 Ratings
Report Versioning00 Ratings9.04 Ratings
Report Delivery Scheduling00 Ratings8.04 Ratings
Delivery to Remote Servers00 Ratings9.04 Ratings
Data Discovery and Visualization
Comparison of Data Discovery and Visualization features of Product A and Product B
Datadog
-
Ratings
Grafana
7.7
4 Ratings
6% below category average
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)00 Ratings8.94 Ratings
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization00 Ratings9.04 Ratings
Predictive Analytics00 Ratings7.04 Ratings
Pattern Recognition and Data Mining00 Ratings6.12 Ratings
Best Alternatives
DatadogGrafana
Small Businesses
InfluxDB
InfluxDB
Score 8.8 out of 10
Supermetrics
Supermetrics
Score 9.9 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Logz.io
Logz.io
Score 7.0 out of 10
Supermetrics
Supermetrics
Score 9.9 out of 10
Enterprises
NetBrain Technologies
NetBrain Technologies
Score 9.1 out of 10
Dataiku
Dataiku
Score 7.8 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
DatadogGrafana
Likelihood to Recommend
9.0
(22 ratings)
9.0
(5 ratings)
Usability
10.0
(1 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
8.9
(6 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
DatadogGrafana
Likelihood to Recommend
Datadog
Datadog works really well with complex microservices architecture like any E-commerce platform which will be having multiple services but they all are interdependent to others so in this scenario Datadog will be best to monitor these as it will show the transactions also between those microservices. If you are using multiple services in your architecture whether it will be cloud services or on prem services Datadog will be the best choice to monitor all those service with in Datadog so that you can see everything in a single place. But if you are having small architecture and few services in that then in that scenario you can use Datadog but it will be little costly as compared to other but obviously the features are very well.
Read full review
Grafana Labs
Just about any organization with more than one server and more than one cluster as it scales very well. Configuration of the application takes time and finesse to fine tune to where the balance of load time and getting data quickly meets. The plugins add load time but fine tuning for the application to meet demand needs nailed down at implementation
Read full review
Pros
Datadog
  • Create Dashboards as per application, environments, and Custom metrics in one panel.
  • Log aggregation, one-stop Application monitoring tools for the whole infrastructure.
  • Playbooks, SLA definition, success and error quotas, request visualizations.
  • DB monitoring, Serverless stack monitoring.
  • Alerting of Production incidents so we can quickly resolve the issues on time.
Read full review
Grafana Labs
  • Alerting through many different medium as Slack, Email, Webhook etc
  • Beautiful and unlimited number of dashboards to view your metrics and tweak them as you please
  • Log aggregation and powerful Logql to filter and view your logs
  • Microservices monitoring
  • Large number of plugins and data sources to collect your metrics from almost anywhere
Read full review
Cons
Datadog
  • Alert windows cause lag in notifications (e.g. if the alert window is X errors in 1 hour, we won't get alerted until the end of the 1 hour range)
  • I would appreciate more supportive examples for how to filter and view metrics in the explorer
  • I would like a more clear interface for metrics that are missing in a time frame, rather than only showing tags/etc. for metrics that were collected within the currently viewed time frame
Read full review
Grafana Labs
  • There are some settings which we can't configure from UI (Web Console).
  • We've open[ed] up configuration files in command line text editors and manually do the settings e.g. LDAP/SSO configuration.
  • In terms of visualization, it's best, but it doesn't support log analysis otherwise it could destroy business of all other visualization tools.
Read full review
Usability
Datadog
There is some room for improvement, but the Datadog team sends out updates frequently, and the UI is user-friendly for engineers, with no significant loading issues or region-specific problems. That was one of the key reasons we preferred Datadog; our company has employees worldwide, and it wasn't difficult to transition to the tool.
Read full review
Grafana Labs
It is infinitely flexible. If you can imagine it, Grafana can almost certainly do it. Usability may be in the eye of the beholder however, as there is time needed to curate the experience and get the dashboards customized to how it makes sense to you. I know one thing they are working on are more templates, based on data sources
Read full review
Support Rating
Datadog
The support team usually gets it right. We did have a rather complicate issue setting up monitoring on a domain controller. However, they are usually responsive and helpful over chat. The downside would be I don’t think they have any phone support. If that is important to you this might not be a good fit.
Read full review
Grafana Labs
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
Datadog
We are still trying other products, but people still like Datadog. After setting up a dashboard, it's great for monitoring instances on Datadog. Also, the DevOps team had a good time setting up Datadog. It means Datadog was way easier to set up compared to those others.
Read full review
Grafana Labs
Grafana blows Nagios out of the water when it comes to customization. The ability to feed almost any data source makes it very versatile and the cost is great.
Read full review
Return on Investment
Datadog
  • Saved us (time & money) from developing our own monitoring utilities that would pale in comparison
  • Alerts allow us to remedy issues before our customers even know about them
  • Tracking resource usage over time allows us to better plan for future needs, before it becomes a pain-point.
Read full review
Grafana Labs
  • Grafana has replaced many higher priced tools
  • The integrations are seemless with multiple backends
  • Combining graphs and dashboards from multiple data sources is a game changer
Read full review
ScreenShots

Datadog Screenshots

Screenshot of the out-of-the-box and customizable monitoring dashboards.Screenshot of Datadog's collaboration features, where users can discuss issues in-context with production data, annotate changes and notify their teams, see who responded to that alert before, and discover what was done to fix it.Screenshot of where Datadog unifies traces, metrics, and logs—the three pillars of observability.Screenshot of some of Datadog's 400+ built-in integrations.Screenshot of Datadog's Service Map, which decomposes an application into all its component services and draws the observed dependencies between these services in real timeScreenshot of centralized log data, pulled from any source.