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Datadog vs Elastic Stack 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

Datadog
Ranking in Log Management
4th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
209
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (1st), Network Monitoring Software (3rd), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (2nd), Container Monitoring (1st), Cloud Monitoring Software (1st), AIOps (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (5th), AI Observability (1st)
Elastic Stack
Ranking in Log Management
14th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
18
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Datadog is 4.4%, down from 6.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Elastic Stack is 3.3%, down from 4.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Log Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Datadog4.4%
Elastic Stack3.3%
Other92.3%
Log Management
 

Featured Reviews

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.
LB
Senior Consultant at Skillfield
Offers robust out-of-the-box integrations and streamlines logging processes effortlessly
There are improvements needed for Elastic Stack. It is mostly based on Lucene, and the heart of Elastic Stack is Lucene, which has some limitations. Anything built on top of Lucene often feels an add-on, and that includes vector databases. Elastic Stack can store vector embeddings as well and perform AI and machine learning tasks out of the box without excessive configuration. The main improvements involve increasing speed and compression capabilities; I have seen databases that claim to achieve significantly better compression. While Elastic Stack can manage vast amounts of data, if the mapping is not specified correctly, the indexing time can be slow, especially with many events per second. Improper mapping usually means that every document received gets indexed for all fields, which is not desired. Elastic consultants typically optimize this, but out of the box, as data volume increases, scaling becomes necessary. They are working on these improvements in new versions.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Datadog's log aggregation is really helpful since it lets me and every other engineer on my team login, view, and share logs when we need to debug our application."
"We integrate our application logs. It is great to be able to tie our metrics and our traces together."
"The most valuable features are logging, the extensive set of integrations, and easy jumpstart."
"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."
"The most valuable feature is the dashboards that are provided out of the box, as well as ones we were able to configure."
"The CCM, Workflows, Logs, APM, and RUM are all useful aspects of the solution."
"Datadog dashboards are pretty great."
"The dashboards provide a comprehensive and visually intuitive way to monitor all our key data points in real-time, making it easier to spot trends and potential issues."
"Elastic Stack is mainly used to monitor servers and APIs. It helps ensure the software's availability and sends notifications at the right time so the system is not down for a long time. The tool's stability and advanced features, such as anomaly detection, are the most valuable features. The benefit of using it is real-time monitoring."
"The tool's most powerful aspect is its search engine capability. It's a highly effective and powerful solution for searching. We use it in professional and student projects at universities, and it delivers promising results."
"It is a very scalable solution...I didn't face any problem with this scalability part of the solution since we only have a few pieces of equipment in our company."
"The scripting model in Elastic Stack allows me to query logs and then put the data into Grafana."
"Prior to the latest updates, data lake management was a standout feature. The hybrid capability for on-premise and cloud integration was also crucial. Now, with Elastic Defense, the agent simplifies security monitoring, making it a key asset."
"I think the ecosystem is well supported, and for logs, it was faster compared to our previous previous log management."
"The centralized logging capabilities of Elastic Stack have helped me streamline my logging processes significantly because there are many open-source tools available, such as Filebeat and Logstash, to collect the logs."
"The detection rules in Elastic Stack are the most valuable feature. The search capabilities are excellent and fast. As we collect logs from workstations and devices, the detection rules run on top of the logs and detect any suspicious activity, raising alerts accordingly. Integration with Elastic Stack depends on the specific integration. Elastic provides some bridging integrations that make it easy, but require custom integration. Most integrations are simple, but customization can be challenging because we need to do some parsing. There's something called Elastic Common Schema, and we need to parse the source logs to match this schema, which can be a bit challenging."
 

Cons

"It can have a more modernized pricing mechanism. We're actually working with them to figure out how to become more modular and have a better and more modernized pricing mechanism. The issue with Datadog is that you have to buy the whole suite of different products, and you kind of get stuck in the old utilization of 40% of their suite. Most organizations today break down between application development, networking, and security. Therefore, there should be a way to break down different modules into just app dev, infosec, networking, etc. Customers have various needs across their business lines, and sometimes, they're just not willing to have tools that they're not using 100%. AppDynamics is probably a little bit better in terms of being modular."
"The PagerDuty integration could be a little bit better."
"We primarily use the log management functionality, and the only feedback I have there is better fuzzy text searching in logs (the kind that Kibana has)."
"The solution should provide alerts for cloud outages."
"I rate Datadog an eight out of ten because the expense of using it keeps it from being a nine or ten."
"There are some areas on log filtering screens where the user interface can take some getting used to."
"I would also like to see an improvement in the server's data extraction times, as sometimes it can take up to ten minutes to download a report for a critical issue that is costing us money."
"The on-premise version is very difficult to upgrade."
"I would rate the technical support by Elastic as five or six out of ten. They should improve their response time and first-level support, particularly knowledge, which is very important for using Elasticsearch."
"Improving integration capabilities, especially with authentication systems, firewalls, and security controls, is a crucial area for improvement in Elastic Stack. Additionally, enhancing functionality to handle large Yara queries more efficiently would be beneficial, as many EDR solutions can run such queries faster than Elastic Stack's current limitations."
"Improvements are needed in the solution in areas like SOAR and TIP, where there are certain shortcomings."
"Elastic Stack's search capabilities can be challenging, especially when searching for precise data from past years, such as two or ten years ago. Its indexing performance for exact data retrieval may decrease as the data volume grows. Therefore, I believe there is room for improvement in the product's search functionality. It needs to improve its pricing as well."
"The stability of the solution is rated as three or four out of ten as we frequently encounter issues."
"The solution is expensive, particularly the training and certification. If customers want to increase their use of Elastic Stack, they should consider reducing the cost of certification and training."
"While Elastic Stack can manage vast amounts of data, if the mapping is not specified correctly, the indexing time can be slow, especially with many events per second."
"The main issue related to Elastic Stack is in the area of its licensing."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"I am not satisfied with its licensing. Its payment is based on the exported data, and there was an explosion of the data for three or four weeks. My customer was not alerted, and there was no way for them to see that there has been an explosion of data. They got a big invoice for one or two months. The pricing model of Datadog is based on the data. The customer was quite surprised about not being alerted about this explosion of data. They should provide some kind of alert when there is an increase in usage."
"​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."
"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."
"The cost is high and this can be justified if the scale of the environment is big."
"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."
"The solution's pricing depends on project volume."
"The price is better than some competing products."
"It depends on the specifics, but generally, Elastic is economical for certain use cases."
"I used the open-source version of Elastic Stack, because of which I did not have to pay anything."
"I rate the solution's pricing a six out of ten."
"We are using the open-source community version of the product."
"The product is expensive."
"If I compare Elastic Stack to the other products in the market, I would say that the tool is available at a competitive price."
"The pricing is reasonable."
"Ultimately, the pricing depends upon the capacity planning that the enterprise architect does."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
6%
Computer Software Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business81
Midsize Enterprise46
Large Enterprise99
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business10
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise6
 

Questions from the Community

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 ...
What do you like most about Elastic Stack?
The tool is huge, and it performs brilliantly. I tested it for malware, and within two weeks of launching, the product alerted me about a network intrusion. This was a tough test for it, but it per...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Elastic Stack?
My experience with Elastic Stack pricing indicates that it is node-based. While I do not have complete pricing details, they are available online. If I choose Elastic Cloud, it includes licensing a...
What needs improvement with Elastic Stack?
I would like to improve Elastic Stack by addressing the current big problem we face with importing logs and log files, such as syslogs. To import these log files, we need to design the ingest pipel...
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

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
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Find out what your peers are saying about Datadog vs. Elastic Stack and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
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