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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
3rd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
211
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (1st), Network Monitoring Software (3rd), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (2nd), Container Monitoring (2nd), Cloud Monitoring Software (2nd), AIOps (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (5th), AI Observability (1st)
Elastic Stack
Ranking in Log Management
10th
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 January 2026, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Datadog is 4.7%, down from 6.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Elastic Stack is 4.0%, down from 4.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Log Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Datadog4.7%
Elastic Stack4.0%
Other91.3%
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

"By moving to Datadog, we did not need to manage our own monitoring infrastructure anymore."
"The agents feature in Datadog stands out as a valuable asset within our organization due to its robust functionality, versatility, and role in providing comprehensive monitoring and observability capabilities."
"With Datadog, we managed to get everyone on board into a single place and a single tool, providing teams with one spot where they can check everything related to monitoring, and enabling management and leadership to have an overview of all tools working together."
"We like the distributed tracing and flame graphs for debugging. This has been invaluable for us during periods of high traffic or red alert conditions."
"Having a clear view, not only of our infrastructure but our apps and services as well, has brought a great added value to our customers."
"Datadog has so far been a breeze to use and set up."
"Datadog has given us near-live visibility across our entire cloud platform."
"The real-time data helps us make informed decisions and optimize our operations, ultimately enhancing our overall efficiency and performance."
"The biggest strength of Elastic Stack is its brilliant archiving capabilities."
"We can group a lot of alarms into one automation alarm supervision. The alarm supervision allows us to put the alarm under the same. It's quite helpful for us. We used that to suppress our alarms. Elastic already provides the agent. It is easy to integrate Elastic Stack with other devices and vendors."
"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."
"I have benefited from the security features provided by X-Pack in Elastic Stack, particularly the SIEM capability, which is very good for checking security issues."
"The solution's technical support is good...Elastic Stack offers good value for value for money based on the product's features and what they offer."
"The machine learning capabilities are valuable."
"The only beneficial aspect of Elastic Stack is that it's open source."
 

Cons

"The sheer amount of products that are included can be overwhelming."
"We would love to see a % consumed and alert us if we are over budget before getting an overage charge 20 days into the month."
"I'm still exploring the trial version, and it is fine. One thing that I haven't been able to figure out is how to retrieve a report. This is something that could be improved. I probably need to navigate to a place to access the reports."
"Even though it is powerful on its own, the UI-based design lacks elegance, efficiency, and complexity."
"Datadog does not have the feature where you can monitor external websites or check the SSL secure for websites."
"The pricing nowadays is quite complex."
"The query performance could be improved, particularly when handling large datasets, as slower response times can hinder efficiency."
"The pricing model can be quite complex and might benefit from more flexible options tailored to different organizational needs."
"The tool's pricing can be improved."
"The main issue related to Elastic Stack is in the area of its licensing."
"Agent deployment is a little tough in the on-premise version."
"Elastic Stack should work on their dashboards and integration process."
"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."
"When people try to move the data from another source to Elastic Stack for visualization, they face challenges when connecting to Elastic Stack from such different sources."
"There could be better documentation."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Our licensing fees are paid on a monthly basis."
"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."
"The cost is high and this can be justified if the scale of the environment is big."
"Licensing is based on the retention period of logs and metrics."
"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."
"The solution's pricing depends on project volume."
"If you do your homework, you'll find that if you're really concerned with cost, it's good."
"The price is better than some competing products."
"If I compare Elastic Stack to the other products in the market, I would say that the tool is available at a competitive price."
"I used the open-source version of Elastic Stack, because of which I did not have to pay anything."
"It depends on the specifics, but generally, Elastic is economical for certain use cases."
"The pricing is reasonable."
"The product is expensive."
"We are using the open-source community version of the product."
"I rate the solution's pricing a six out of ten."
"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
12%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
6%
Computer Software Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Government
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business80
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: December 2025.
881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.