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Amazon CloudWatch vs Datadog comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 13, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
7.1
Amazon CloudWatch offers cost savings and control, aiding compliance but challenges remain in quantifying returns during cloud migrations.
Sentiment score
7.0
Datadog enhances visibility, reduces downtime, saves costs, and optimizes workflows by integrating features and improving operational efficiency.
Amazon CloudWatch offers cost-saving advantages by being an inbuilt solution that requires no separate setup or maintenance for monitoring tasks.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.4
Amazon CloudWatch support is generally praised for responsiveness and expertise, though experiences and costs vary by support package.
Sentiment score
7.1
Datadog's customer service is responsive and knowledgeable, though some users report delays with complex queries and phone support.
While using their cloud and cloud resources, if you have an issue with CloudWatch, you must pay additional monthly fees to get time from dedicated tech support.
In recent years, due to business expansion, knowledge levels among support engineers seem to vary.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.7
Amazon CloudWatch is praised for its scalability, managing large workloads effortlessly and adapting to diverse performance monitoring needs.
Sentiment score
7.6
Datadog efficiently scales with cloud services, offering seamless expansion, though users highlight the importance of monitoring pricing.
Amazon CloudWatch's scalability is managed by AWS.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.1
Amazon CloudWatch is reliable and stable, though users experience occasional logging delays and minor complexities in query customization.
Sentiment score
8.0
Datadog offers reliable and stable performance with minimal downtime, impressive uptime, and efficient monitoring, even during peak periods.
I sometimes notice slowness when Amazon CloudWatch agents are installed on machines with less capacity, causing me to use other monitoring tools.
 

Room For Improvement

Amazon CloudWatch needs enhancements in customization, log management, pricing, integrations, data visibility, and user interface for better performance.
Datadog needs improved performance, interface simplification, clearer billing, better integration, customization, analytics, documentation, security, and mobile app integration.
When using third-party dashboards such as Kibana or Grafana and other visualization tools, there should be a way to feed CloudWatch's data and logging capabilities into these visualization tools.
Amazon CloudWatch charges extra for custom metrics, which is a significant disadvantage.
Maybe Amazon Web Services can improve by providing a library for CloudWatch with some useful features.
In future updates, I would like to see AI features included in Datadog for monitoring AI spend and usage to make the product more versatile and appealing for the customer.
The documentation is adequate, but team members coming into a project could benefit from more guided, interactive tutorials, ideally leveraging real-world data.
There should be a clearer view of the expenses.
 

Setup Cost

Amazon CloudWatch pricing is usage-based, often cost-effective, but may increase with data use and custom metrics.
Datadog offers flexible pricing based on usage and organization size, with potential for high costs if not monitored closely.
Overall, the pricing of Amazon CloudWatch is very expensive.
Amazon CloudWatch charges more for custom metrics as well as for changes in the timeline.
The setup cost for Datadog is more than $100.
 

Valuable Features

Amazon CloudWatch offers metrics, alerts, automation, and analytics with seamless AWS integration, scalability, and third-party service support.
Datadog offers intuitive, comprehensive monitoring and integrations, enhancing infrastructure and application management with real-time insights and efficient operations.
Being an inbuilt solution from AWS, it saves time on installation, setup, and maintenance.
The best features of Amazon CloudWatch need to improve visibility into the network because when using hundreds of network resources such as transit gateway, VPNs, routers, route tables, and firewalls, it does not give many details in a structured manner.
I like its filtering capability and its ability to give the cyber engine insights.
Our architecture is written in several languages, and one area where Datadog particularly shines is in providing first-class support for a multitude of programming languages.
The technology itself is generally very useful.
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon CloudWatch
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
13th
Ranking in Log Management
12th
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
10th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
47
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Datadog
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
1st
Ranking in Log Management
3rd
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
2nd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
188
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (4th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (2nd), Container Monitoring (1st), AIOps (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (7th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Cloud Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Amazon CloudWatch is 2.3%, down from 3.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Datadog is 9.3%, down from 12.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Monitoring Software
 

Featured Reviews

Rahul Kundu - PeerSpot reviewer
Proactively address issues with seamless monitoring while enhancing custom metrics functionality
We use CloudWatch for monitoring and logging. It helps us monitor our applications' performance, particularly in ensuring that every API hit returns a response within four seconds, which is our SLA. We also monitor invocation errors in Lambda and use CloudWatch alerts to notify us of any issues…
reviewer820579 - PeerSpot reviewer
Single pane of glass, easy to share dashboards, and good for monitoring
We've had some issues where we had Datadog automatically turned on in AWS regions that we weren't using, which incurred a small but steady cost that amounted to tens of thousands of dollars spent over a few weeks. I wish there was a global setting that lets an admin restrict which regions DD is turned on in as a default setup step. Sometimes, the APM service dashboard link isn't sharable. I click something in the service catalog, and on that service's APM default view, I try to share a link to that with a teammate, and they reach a blank or error screen. I wish there was more organization and detail in the suggestions when I use the query editor. I'm never quite sure when the autofill dropdown shows up if I'm seeing some custom tag or some default property, so I have to know exactly what I'm looking for in order to build a chart. It's hard to navigate and explore using the query autofill suggestions without knowing exactly what tag to look for. It's been a bit hard to understand how data gets sampled or how many data points a particular dashboard value is using. We've had questions over the RUM metrics that we see and we had to ask for help with how values are calculated, bin sizes, etc to get confidence in our data.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
University
5%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon CloudWatch?
Overall, the pricing of Amazon CloudWatch is very expensive.
What needs improvement with Amazon CloudWatch?
Apart from traceability of network resources, Amazon CloudWatch needs to be more interoperable with other tools because many companies are starting to use AI-based dashboards. When using third-part...
Any advice about APM solutions?
There are many factors and we know little about your requirements (size of org, technology stack, management systems, the scope of implementation). Our goal was to consolidate APM and infra monitor...
Datadog vs ELK: which one is good in terms of performance, cost and efficiency?
With Datadog, we have near-live visibility across our entire platform. We have seen APM metrics impacted several times lately using the dashboards we have created with Datadog; they are very good c...
Which would you choose - Datadog or Dynatrace?
Our organization ran comparison tests to determine whether the Datadog or Dynatrace network monitoring software was the better fit for us. We decided to go with Dynatrace. Dynatrace offers network ...
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

AirAsia, Airbnb, Aircel, APUS, Avazu, Casa & Video, Futbol Club Barcelona (FCBarcelona), National Taiwan University, redBus
Adobe, Samsung, facebook, HP Cloud Services, Electronic Arts, salesforce, Stanford University, CiTRIX, Chef, zendesk, Hearst Magazines, Spotify, mercardo libre, Slashdot, Ziff Davis, PBS, MLS, The Motley Fool, Politico, Barneby's
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon CloudWatch vs. Datadog and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
865,164 professionals have used our research since 2012.