Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

ControlUp vs Datadog comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 6, 2025

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

ControlUp
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
33rd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.9
Number of Reviews
12
Ranking in other categories
Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) (5th)
Datadog
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
2nd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
187
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (1st), Network Monitoring Software (4th), Log Management (3rd), Container Monitoring (2nd), Cloud Monitoring Software (2nd), AIOps (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (6th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the IT Infrastructure Monitoring category, the mindshare of ControlUp is 1.0%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Datadog is 5.5%, down from 6.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
IT Infrastructure Monitoring
 

Featured Reviews

Richasvi Tripathi - PeerSpot reviewer
Used to monitor several devices, but most reports do not give information of all the devices
We have approximately 10 to 20 feature requests pending on the vendor side. Most reports give information about the top 100 devices, but not all of the devices. In our case, we are monitoring 200000 devices. So, we need details for all those devices, but that is limited to 100, which they have improved to an extent in some reports. I'm thinking of one feature request for ISPs because the dashboard does not provide a detailed list of ISPs, and it provides the wrong list. I feel some firewall issues are blocking that, and the team cannot send that detail. That may be the case. One feature request pending on the vendor side is the data format change. Once you see a detail in the report, it is mentioned in some other format, which is hard to analyze sometimes.
Kevin Palmer - PeerSpot reviewer
Useful log aggregation and management with helpful metrics aggregation
Datadog provides us value in three major ways: First, Datadog provides best-in-class functionality in many, if not all, of the products to which we subscribe (infrastructure, APM, log management, serverless, synthetics, real user monitoring, DB monitoring). In my experience with other tools that provide similar functionality, Datadog provides the largest feature set with the most flexibility and the best performance. Second, Datadog allows us to access all of those services in one place. Having to learn and manage only one tool for all of those purposes is a major benefit. Third, Datadog provides significant connectivity between those services so that we can view, summarize, organize, translate and correlate our data with maximum effect. Not needing to manually integrate them to draw lines between those pieces of information is a huge time savings for us.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable feature is the granularity of visibility into the resources that are in use by our applications."
"ControlUp has an easy installation process."
"Security, uptime, and reduced capital expenditures are the main reasons we use ControlUp. So basically, the money that we consume is based on the amount of time we are using a service."
"Integration with Netscaler and Scoutbees can provide a proper end-to-end analysis of the user's experience and give us a real ROI."
"The script-based actions have allowed us to extend the core reporting capabilities."
"ControlUp has some good functionalities, such as remotely pushing scripts in the device through the tool."
"It shows you so many details of what's going on in that log-on that, if there's a problem, you can identify it in five minutes."
"It has a great career time monitoring tool."
"Datadog has proven to be easy to set up and legible for both development and operational teams."
"Datadog infrastructure monitoring has helped us identify health issues with our virtual machines, such as high load, CPU, and disk usage, as well as monitoring uptime and alerting when Kubernetes containers have a bad time staying up."
"The initial setup was straightforward from my own experience, helping integrate within the application and service levels."
"The integration into AWS is key as well as our software is currently bound to AWS."
"Its logs are most valuable."
"Datadog provides tracing and logging, whereas Dynatrace focuses on tracing, and Splunk is more of a logging tool. Datadog's advantage is that we don't need two tools."
"The ingestion points are unlimited and support customization. We haven't had anything yet that we haven't been able to integrate with it."
"The interface and the integrations make it so easy to connect to the cloud or to the on-premise environment."
 

Cons

"It can be improved by including script-based scheduling."
"There is area for improvement, maybe in the reporting. It could use some work in reporting."
"There was some lag earlier, and reports pulled from the dashboard would sometimes be half an hour old. But now, the information provides real-time status, which is greatly appreciated. Overall, I've seen improvement in the product."
"We'd like to see the mobile app working again so that we can get alerts 24/7. This is especially useful for the person on call."
"Most reports give information about the top 100 devices, but not all of the devices."
"ControlUp could improve the integration. Microsoft Azure Virtual Desktop monitoring has better integration."
"Solve is a quick and intuitive tool for quickly mapping data together, however, once you have the view of the data that you like, it is difficult to share this with colleagues."
"Integration is always a problem, and we feel that we are doing our best and the service provider thinks they are doing their best. I guess if ControlUp's system could be more capable or if people could understand the integration part, that would be better."
"Auto instrumentation on tracing has not been very easy to find in the documentation."
"One area where the product could be improved is Application Performance Monitoring (APM)."
"In the past two years, there have been a couple of outages."
"We would really like to see more from the Service Catalog."
"I find the setup cost to be too expensive. The setup cost for Datadog is more than $100. I am evaluating the usage of this solution, however, it is too expensive."
"One key improvement we would like to see in a future Datadog release is the inclusion of certain metrics that are currently unavailable. Specifically, the ability to monitor CPU and memory utilization of AWS-managed Airflow workers, schedulers, and web servers would be highly beneficial for our organization."
"There are some areas on log filtering screens where the user interface can take some getting used to."
"I'd like to see an expansion of the Android and IOS apps to have a simplified CI/CD pipeline history view."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Based on my experience, ControlUp is not that expensive."
"Personally, I would say that the only thing I could compare it to is another monitoring tool that we use, Nagios."
"We are satisfied with the price compared to other solutions."
"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."
"My advice is to really keep an eye on your overage costs, as they can spiral really fast."
"The price of Datadog is reasonable. Other solutions are more expensive, such as AppDynamics."
"It costs the same amount it would if we were hosting it ourselves, so we are incredibly happy with the cost."
"It didn't scale well from the cost perspective. We had a custom package deal."
"Sometimes it's very hard to project how much it will cost for the monthly subscription for the next month when you add certain features. Having better visibility of the cost would give a better experience."
"The solution's pricing depends on project volume."
"The pricing came up a bit compared to their competitors. It is not that the price has risen, but that the competitors have gone down. They keep adding more features that I would have expected to be baked in at a more nominal price. I have been increasingly dissatisfied with the pricing, but not enough to jump ship."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which IT Infrastructure Monitoring solutions are best for your needs.
860,592 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
12%
Healthcare Company
12%
Insurance Company
8%
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Educational Organization
12%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ControlUp Real-time?
Based on my experience, ControlUp is not that expensive. It is a cheap tool because it is deployed to many devices where I work.
What needs improvement with ControlUp Real-time?
There is area for improvement, maybe in the reporting. It could use some work in reporting.
What is your primary use case for ControlUp Real-time?
My use cases include everything, and I don't mean that facetiously. I mean everything. We manage the servers, manage user sessions, manage everything. We monitor monitoring and take actual actions,...
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

B/E Aerospace, North Carolina SECU, Vancouver Island Health Authority, University of Florida
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 ControlUp vs. Datadog and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
860,592 professionals have used our research since 2012.