Datadog vs. Prometheus

Datadog

Prometheus

Overview
Product	Rating	Most Used By	Product Summary	Starting 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.	$1.27 per month (billed annually) per host
Prometheus	Score 8.2 out of 10	N/A	Prometheus is a service monitoring and time series database, which is open source.	N/A

Pricing

Datadog

Prometheus

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

No answers on this topic

Offerings

Pricing Offerings
Datadog	Prometheus
Free Trial
Yes	No
Free/Freemium Version
Yes	No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No	No

Entry-level Setup Fee

Optional

No setup fee

Additional Details

Discount available for annual pricing. Multi-Year/Volume discounts available (500+ hosts/mo).

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More Pricing Information

Community Pulse
	Datadog	Prometheus
Considered Both Products	Datadog Verified User Anonymous Chose Datadog In terms of usability, I’ve found Datadog significantly more approachable and powerful compared to Elasticsearch, especially for day-to-day operational monitoring. Datadog offers a much more cohesive, user-friendly interface out of the box, with built-in support for metrics, … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Datadog Kibana and New Relic Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Datadog Datadog is an all in one solution. It has everything in one place so you don't have to go from application to application and try to figure out what exactly happened. No more stitching database errors from one third party to backend errors in another to front end errors in … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Datadog the search query is very easy to search the logs Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Datadog Datadog crushed the competition on price and offering more solutions in one product cutting down on implementation time and effort while ensuring that the "integration" between one of their offerings was completely compatible with any of the others. I'm sure it's not the case … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Datadog We've completely replaced New Relic with Datadog and find it easier to use and more comprehensive. Our AWS and Sentry usage will continue for now. But Datadog gives us a much broader coverage - we can monitor our AWS services and many other services that interact with them. … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous 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). … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous 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) Incentivized Helpful? Anuj Rai Performance Engineer Chose Datadog The first reason for selecting Datadog was of course it's pricing which is quite better in terms of competitor like Appdynamics and splunk. Second thing is versatile services which they are offering on one platform which means entire end to end services can be monitor at one … Incentivized Helpful? Aman Makwana DevOps Engineer 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 … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Datadog One of the most important reason is single agent configuration for all kinds of monitoring. It also proved an auto upgrade feature of agents that reduces the overhead. It also provides range of options when it comes to data visualization and dashboards. It also provide tagging … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Datadog Kubernetes with Prometheus and other open-source options. It is prone to more toil to set up but the stack can be largely replicated in open source technologies. Incentivized Helpful? RR Rajeshh Raghavan Systems Analyst, Engineering Chose Datadog OEM and Vertica Management console are limited to their own databases whereas Datadog has the ability to monitor multiple types of databases. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Datadog New Relic was a good tool but had really pushy salespeople. They also released a product called infrastructure recently, and it was worse than their previous product (servers). The previous product was also free! Needless to say, we will not be going back to New Relic any time … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Datadog Easier to set up and integrate with other auxiliary tools. The cost was also a benefit along with self-service capabilities. We could set up Data Dog by ourselves, versus needing to bring additional consulting efforts to setup Dynatrace. Reliability of results (less false … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Datadog Ultimately, Datadog had the most already-built bridges into our existing infrastructure -- third parties that we're using for certain services are far more likely to work with Datadog than other systems. This means that, while expensive, Datadog has done a tremendous amount of … Incentivized Helpful? Gabriel Samaroo Senior Software Engineer Chose Datadog Datadog has been harder to setup out-of-the-box compared to its alternatives, although it's graphs and dashboards have been more useful. Other tools handle individual tasks better. For example, Splunk has been the best logging tool I've used, and New Relic is great for CPU and … Incentivized Helpful? Anthony Zappala ServiceNow Lead Engineer/Architect Chose Datadog No alternatives were considered for our needs. Incentivized Helpful? Rahul Narula Senior Engineer Chose Datadog It has been easier to work with Datadog for all our business needs and get things on their roadmap if we found it lacking. Currently we use a mix of various tools as they were existing prior to Datadog came. We are evaluating new offering like Datadog's latest log management to … Incentivized Helpful? Girivaru Tarun Customer Success Manager Chose Datadog I am listing how Datadog is better than below chosen NotSensu - Datadog has more integrations and easy to use UI. Prometheus - Datadog Integration are more in number than, simple installation process Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose 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. Incentivized Helpful? Mariano Koldobsky Project Leader Chose Datadog I have only used Datadog Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Datadog The pricing, the customer service and it most importantly it does the job we expect. Incentivized Helpful? Kevin Van Heusen Software Architect Chose Datadog Geckoboard has nice dashboard options, however their third party system support isn't as strong as Datadog. Geckoboard did not support all the various server and development systems we use, whereas Datadog did. Also, Datadog has better alerting and monitoring options than … Incentivized Helpful? Deepshikha Gandhi DevOps Engineer Chose Datadog Datadog empowers us to create dashboards and visualize the state of our infrastructure in real time. It gives us control over what we want to view and how. The graphs provide deep insight into trends and anamoly detectives. These features are lacking in some of the other … Incentivized Helpful?	Prometheus Verified User Anonymous Chose Prometheus It is easier to setup, but learning curve is quite moderately steep. Prometheus is a best-in-class tool for engineers and SREs in cloud-native environments. When extended with tools like Thanos or Cortex, it can rival commercial platforms in scale and capability—but requires … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Prometheus As I mentioned earlier, Prometheus had an added advantage that we were able to monitor CPU, RAM, Disk Space, process monitoring which other tools did not provide us Some tools were obsolete, and other were costly when we wanted this good feature , only Prometheus delivered on … Incentivized Helpful? Animesh Kumar Senior Member of Technical Staff Chose Prometheus We considered TICK stack as an alternative to our Prometheus/Grafana setup that we have for capturing, storing and visualizing the time series data. But it seemed more complicated to learn and required a separate DB called InfluxDB to be setup. So, after all these considerations, … Incentivized Helpful? Abhishek Nandi Sr. Engineer Chose Prometheus The software is very lightweight and can be hosted with minimal resource usage. Many exporters exist for various software. Prometheus has a powerful and flexible query language (PromQL) that allows analyzing your data easy. I use this software with its various exporters, … Incentivized Helpful? YG Yatin Garg Product Manager Chose Prometheus Highly customized pricing plans to choose from. Lower pricing for the same features compared to competitors. Easy to reach the support team, which provided detailed documentation and helped set up the Prometheus. Monitoring metrics gets very easy after the integration with … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Prometheus Since Prometheus is free to use and provides all the features we required we went with Prometheus if any feature is missing then we can consider other paid solutions like data dog. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Prometheus It was easy to implement in our enviroment compared to the other products which has a lot of challenges in the POC period it self. We have been looking for a quick solution as it was implemented during COVID, hence we were trying to take advantage of this software to see how it … Incentivized Helpful? Fernando Roque Statistical Analyst Chose Prometheus Prometheus was built to monitor CLOUD infrastructure. InfluxDB also has a good design to monitor time series but does not have a design for these demands. InfluxDB would need customization to integrate with Grafana and other third-party solutions. A disadvantage of InfluxDB is … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Prometheus Both were present in the toolset. Splunk Enterprise was used in more of the log observability tool than the monitoring of the service. Prometheus was used mainly on the server and services monitoring and alerting capability used to have a stable production environment. … Incentivized Helpful? VR Vishal Ranjan Senior Storage Administrator Chose Prometheus Out of all the products that we did POC, Prometheus was the easiest to integrate the tool with our storage grid on which some of our most business-critical application workflows run. Prometheus was not only able to solve the monitoring problem but also provided a variety of … Incentivized Helpful? LAura Birt Information Technology Manager Chose Prometheus The installation of Nagios core is quite difficult and the whole system seems us like a huge headache for us the entire team is not much happy with Nagios core so we take the decision and switch to Prometheus and were really happy with our decision and satisfied. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Prometheus We used Grafana and Prometheus to take advantage of both tools' features (ex. alerting, and visualization with Grafana). Incentivized Helpful? Lankit Patel AWS Developer \| Laravel Developer Chose Prometheus prometheus brings the power of real-time graphs to the land of open source ( reference included ). It's lightweight and doesn't seem overkill if you're a startup company and do not have a heavy traffic load. Great for starting out on small to mid-scale. as traffic rises, you … Incentivized Helpful? Shivang Kar Lead Product Engineer Chose Prometheus The reason Prometheus stands tall against its competitions is because it is generic. Hence, it can be used to monitor all kinds of services, be it Database, Servers etc. Whereas CloudWatch only monitors over AWS services. Another reason is its huge availability of integrations … Incentivized Helpful? Joshua Li System Integration And Test Engineer Chose Prometheus Prometheus is great for quantifiable metrics. Loki is intended for log aggregation. Depending on project a different combination of data source types may be needed. However, quantifiable metrics are predominantly supported by Prometheus. Other data sources like elastic search … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Prometheus Prometheus is better as a monitoring tool than graphite as graphite is a passive time series database with a query language. Prometheus has a rich data model by capturing metadata with labels which allows for easy filtering and querying. For a clustered solution, graphite maybe … Incentivized Helpful? Prashant Chaudhari Head of Engineering & Founding team member Chose Prometheus Prometheus is cheaper, and you can quickly set it up compared to others. It is integrated with most of the open-source monitoring and alerting tools and can help small companies in having a cost-effective solution early in their stage. Incentivized Helpful? Luke Villareal Owner \| Co-Founder Chose Prometheus I tested out this solution and vetted out a few other solutions as well and ultimately ended up going with Prometheus due to a few specific reasons. Prometheus has a freemium option that allows a company to maintain cash flow while not sacrificing the quality of the product. It … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Prometheus Prometheus is similar to some of its competitors but delivers with regards to metrics; being used internally by Google and other cloud-native companies like ours gives us the confidence that the alerting industry stakeholders view it as a long-term solution that the community … Incentivized Helpful? Mehmet Fatih Onal Technical Architect Chose Prometheus AppDynamics, Dynatrace and Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Prometheus We evaluated Datadog and New Relic but cost-wise, these 2 are very expensive. Prometheus does require more leg work to match the feature sets but other than time, the cost is free. Pairing with Grafana, Prometheus can pretty much match features with the big players and still … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Prometheus If you combine Prometheus with Grafana, what you get is just amazing. it is basically the best ecosystem that I have seen. Grafana just makes those fancy "iron man" kind of dashboards and it just looks so appealing to your eyes. I have implemented NAGIOS core earlier for … Incentivized Helpful? AK Asad Khan Technical CARE Specialist Chose Prometheus Prometheus is best suited for Kubernetes metrics as compared to Zabbix. Incentivized Helpful?

TrustRadius Insights
	Datadog	Prometheus
Highlights	Research Team Insight Published October 28, 2020 Datadog and Prometheus are IT service monitoring tools designed to give businesses insight into the performance of their hardware and software stacks. Datadog is a single-pane-of-glass solution with monitoring, alerting, data analysis, and visualization capabilities. Prometheus is a free open-source tool focused solely on monitoring and alerting. On TrustRadius, Datadog is used primarily by mid-sized companies, while Prometheus is primarily used by large enterprises. Features Although both Datadog and Prometheus have similar core functionality, their user experience and implementation are significantly different. Datadog is a professionally-supported product with plenty of visual analysis and quality-of-life features. Users on TrustRadius appreciate that it allows them to monitor performance, manage alerts, add and remove monitored resources, and analyze data from a single centralized application. Its data analysis tools in particular give customers multiple ways to view, manipulate, and understand the metrics generated by Datadog. The platform has a wealth of functionality available, and a wide array of officially-supported extensions add helpful features. A professional support team and strong user community help customers resolve any problems they may encounter. Prometheus, on the other hand, is a free open-source tool that focuses exclusively on monitoring and alerting. As a standalone application, Prometheus has a simple initial setup. It stores all scraped metrics in a database that can be searched with a query language to retrieve and evaluate performance data. Prometheus is extremely customizable, with several community-supported integrations and the freedom to create and tweak alerting rules as needed. Limitations Datadog and Prometheus won’t be the right solution for every business, as they have significantly different user experiences. Make sure you consider the limitations of each platform before committing to one or the other. According to reviewers on TrustRadius, Datadog can be overwhelming for new users. Its large array of functionality can be useful, but it can also be intimidating for new users. Overall, the platform requires significant user training and customization. Even experienced users have reported difficulty navigating the platform. Some features and edge cases lack sufficient documentation, necessitating a customer support ticket or a request for help from the community. Although Datadog’s price point is reasonable when compared to licensed competitor software, customers still have to pay per host, per GB of log data, or per log event. For smaller organizations, Datadog may very well be overkill. In comparison, Prometheus offers a classic open-source experience—for better or for worse. Users must be prepared to write code, create configuration files, and operate without a GUI. New users will also have to spend plenty of time learning how to use Prometheus. Since it is an open-source software with no professional support, users will need to rely on community documentation and support, which may be sparse or take time to get results from. Additionally, Prometheus relies on third-party applications for data visualization and analysis, requiring users to manually configure the dataflow from a monitored application to Prometheus, and then from Prometheus to other software. Finally, Prometheus has no built-in authentication or authorization features, relying on other tools to provide access security. Pricing Datadog offers several per-month pricing models designed to adapt to various operation scales and requirements. These models include pricing per host, per million log events, per function, per GB of analyzed log files, and per session. For more details on the available plans and pricing, refer to the Datadog pricing page. Prometheus is open-source and can be downloaded for free.

Best Alternatives
	Datadog	Prometheus
Small Businesses	InfluxDB Score 8.8 out of 10	InfluxDB Score 8.8 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies	Logz.io Score 7.0 out of 10	No answers on this topic
Enterprises	NetBrain Technologies Score 9.2 out of 10	No answers on this topic
All Alternatives	View all alternatives	View all alternatives

User Ratings
	Datadog	Prometheus
Likelihood to Recommend	9.0 (0 ratings)	7.5 (0 ratings)
Usability	10.0 (0 ratings)	6.0 (0 ratings)
Support Rating	8.9 (0 ratings)	5.0 (0 ratings)

User Testimonials
	Datadog	Prometheus
Likelihood to Recommend	A one-stop solution for everything you need. Multiple functionalities are tailored to meet specific business needs. Logs are essential for any business, and Datadog manages logs effectively. Rum sessions are something new to me and have given us a new perspective on how to reverse engineer issues that we see for our customers. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	This program works from the roots of the problem and creates a professional matrix for each of its users. This will give them more skills and resources to carry out tasks and reduce the difficulties of operating each of the processes of my work, as well as being An ally for the manipulation and operability of all your master data; Prometheus is very easy to recommend since it is a program that fulfills its mission. Incentivized Mauricio Lozada System Engineer Read full review
Pros	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. Incentivized Aman Makwana DevOps Engineer Read full review	Looking at metrics such as the aggregate number of HTTP requests served. Understanding how our services are performing in aggregate. Easy to deploy within a variety of architectures/environments. Open source so new features are added regularly and bugs are fixed in a timely manner. Free so there are no licensing restrictions. Endorsed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Cons	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 Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	Customer Service: since this is an open-source tool, customer service is not that great. Generally, you get all answers to your problems in online forums, but in case you got stuck, nobody will assist you in a channelised manner. You will have to find the way out on your own, and it may become frustrating at times. More metrics for dashboards shall be added per the application being monitored. Standards metrics will work in most cases but may not in specific applications. Therefore, customised metrics shall be created for some of the industry-standard niche applications. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Usability	Datadog's user interface is quite friendly and easy to navigate. With menus clearly categorized, and ability to bookmark important dashboards, one can easily find what they're looking for. For dashboards, ability to move and resize visualizations and group them, is really helpful to organize dashboards. Automatic suggestions from Datadog for important visualizations based on the metrics and logs would provide another level of ease of use. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	It is usable and one can learn if few people in the team are already using it. It can be difficult to understand at the beginning because of non intuitive UI and syntax of the rules. So, I've gone for 7 points as there is some room for improvement in user interface and rules syntax. Incentivized Animesh Kumar Senior Member of Technical Staff Read full review
Support Rating	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. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	Never had to reach out to them. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Alternatives Considered	I selected Datadog because of its features and the wide range of integration support. As I already told it supports more that 600+ integrations which helps and organization to keep everything in a single place and also its AI feature which is reducing the time for root cause analysis. Its custom dashboards features which helps us to visualize the data in a more attractive way. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	Highly customized pricing plans to choose from. Lower pricing for the same features compared to competitors. Easy to reach the support team, which provided detailed documentation and helped set up the Prometheus. Monitoring metrics gets very easy after the integration with Grafana. It also has a sophisticated alert setting mechanism to ensure we don't miss anything critical. Incentivized YG Yatin Garg Product Manager Read full review
Return on Investment	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. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	We are still working on the ROI The ROI mentioned during the purchase has not been achieved, however this could be due to lack of data from our side. 2 years of implementation is too early to calculate and confirm the ROI. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
ScreenShots	Datadog Screenshots

Features

Limitations

Pricing