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Checkmk vs Datadog comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 25, 2026

Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

Checkmk
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
15th
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
25th
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
19th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
Server Monitoring (11th)
Datadog
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
3rd
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
2nd
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
1st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
209
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (1st), Log Management (4th), Container Monitoring (1st), AIOps (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (5th), AI Observability (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Cloud Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Checkmk is 3.8%, down from 4.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Datadog is 6.3%, down from 10.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Monitoring Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Datadog6.3%
Checkmk3.8%
Other89.9%
Cloud Monitoring Software
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer1704309 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Administrator at a construction company with 201-500 employees
Utilizing data monitoring capabilities and scripting potential to optimize system management
I frequently program functions with PowerShell, and although Bash could be used, my specialization is in PowerShell. Two of us focus on programming in PowerShell for infrastructure optimization. I set up a dedicated server to run scripts every hour, generating files for Checkmk output. However, Checkmk does not allow running scripts at varying intervals. I am working on this in the raw version of Checkmk.
Dhroov Patel - PeerSpot reviewer
Site Reliability Engineer at Grainger
Has improved incident response with better root cause visibility and supports flexible on-call scheduling
Datadog needs to introduce more hard limits to cost. If we see a huge log spike, administrators should have more control over what happens to save costs. If a service starts logging extensively, I want the ability to automatically direct that log into the cheapest log bucket. This should be the case with many offerings. If we're seeing too much APM, we need to be aware of it and able to stop it rather than having administrators reach out to specific teams. Datadog has become significantly slower over the last year. They could improve performance at the risk of slowing down feature work. More resources need to go into Fleet Automation because we face many problems with things such as the Ansible role to install Datadog in non-containerized hosts. We mainly want to see performance improvements, less time spent looking at costs, the ability to trust that costs will stay reasonable, and an easier way to manage our agents. It is such a powerful tool with much potential on the horizon, but cost control, performance, and agent management need improvement. The main issues are with the administrative side rather than the actual application.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The alerting system in Checkmk really works properly."
"We can monitor multiple sites using the product."
"Checkmk helps me compare data and foresee issues."
"I really like the auto-discovery feature."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is that it has a lot of different pieces, and they all work together...It is a very scalable solution. Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"Checkmk was built on a platform that was user-friendly, and I could build my charts easily."
"It's versatile, scalable, and easier to use compared to other solutions like Nagios and OMD."
"The most valuable features of Checkmk are its resource monitoring, infra monitoring, and log factor configuration."
"Across CCM and the rest of Datadog, I like how sharable everything is."
"The setup cost was minimal."
"I have found some of the most valuable features to be the way things all come together that gives us a point of view that is useful. The panel is very beautiful and customizable."
"We can handle debugging and find out why things are breaking in our applications."
"We have way more observability than what we had before - on the application and the overall system."
"The solution allows flexibility and heightened observability for presenting data, creating indicators, and setting service-level objectives."
"Datadog has so far been a breeze to use and set up."
"Even if something goes wrong and the Datadog tenant becomes completely compromised or if all our monitors were to get erased for whatever reason, we can always restore all our monitoring setup through Terraform, which provides peace of mind."
 

Cons

"It is easy for tech-savvy people, but newcomers might find it intimidating."
"If an alert is generated for a specific pattern in the log, and if Checkmk catches that log, it will stay there even after the alert is resolved."
"Checkmk does not work too easily with the PowerStore. I use a PowerShell script as Checkmk runs on Linux and a Windows system, connecting with the Checkmk agent."
"The main challenge for us is that we're moving from Nagios to Checkmk, and we're still getting used to the new way of working."
"Checkmk does not allow running scripts at varying intervals."
"In Checkmk, the documentation can probably be improved a bit more."
"Sometimes we receive alerts, and it can become annoying when you acknowledge an alert. It is very clunky when you acknowledge the alert. The process is not very intuitive, and there are instances where it feels a bit cumbersome to acknowledge an alert."
"I think that the integration and the exporting of the data collected are areas where Checkmk lacks but should try to improve the most."
"While the UI and search functionality are excellent, further improvement could be made in the querying of logs by offering more advanced templates or suggestions based on common use cases."
"A tool as powerful as Datadog is, understandably, going to have a bit of a learning curve, especially for new team members who are unfamiliar with the bevy of features it offers."
"At the beginning, when we started throwing logs at it, there was a bit of hiccup. However, this was during their beta period, so hiccups were expected."
"We had limitations around RUM and our feature flag provider in Datadog because it's a back-end forward feature flag usage in our Next.js application."
"Datadog could be improved if it could detect other software in a container or server."
"Sometimes, it takes a long time to load the dashboard if we have many charts."
"Datadog could improve its pricing because it is very tricky, and most of our customers notice many hidden costs."
"The hardest thing we experience is just training people on what to search for when identifying a problem in Datadog, and having some additional training that might be easily accessible would probably be a benefit."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product is affordable."
"Checkmk is a fairly reasonably priced solution."
"The price of Checkmk is cheaper compared to other enterprise products."
"If you do your homework, you'll find that if you're really concerned with cost, it's good."
"It costs the same amount it would if we were hosting it ourselves, so we are incredibly happy with the cost."
"It has always scaled for us. Cost scales up too, but that is not necessarily a bad thing. It's reasonable for what they're providing."
"It didn't scale well from the cost perspective. We had a custom package deal."
"The pricing and licensing through AWS Marketplace has been good. It would be nice if it was cheaper, but their pricing is reasonable for what it is. Sometimes, for their newer features, they charge as if it's fully fleshed out, even though it is a newer feature and it may have less stuff than their other items."
"At my last company, we did see ROI, specifically around response time. We could get to mission critical things that were down and losing revenue on immediately. So, the product paid itself back."
"​Pricing seems reasonable. It depends on the size of your organization, the size of your infrastructure, and what portion of your overall business costs go toward infrastructure."
"It is easy to run up a large bill, so become familiar with the cost of each piece of your bill and use the metrics they supply to estimate and monitor your bill."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Government
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise2
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business81
Midsize Enterprise46
Large Enterprise99
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Checkmk?
I will get more information about Checkmk when the proof of concept is done. It's going to be before the summer. There will be a report about the tool and a recommendation to use it. So far, it loo...
What is your primary use case for Checkmk?
Checkmk ( /products/checkmk-reviews ) is a monitoring tool, so that's what I will use it for. Right now, it's not in production, but it's in a proof of concept phase. It looks good, so probably, du...
What advice do you have for others considering Checkmk?
I would rate Checkmk an eight out of ten, not knowing the final report.
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

Information Not Available
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 Checkmk vs. Datadog and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
884,797 professionals have used our research since 2012.