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Datadog vs Grafana Loki 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:
 

Categories and Ranking

Datadog
Ranking in Log Management
4th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
188
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (1st), Network Monitoring Software (4th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (3rd), Container Monitoring (2nd), Cloud Monitoring Software (2nd), AIOps (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (6th)
Grafana Loki
Ranking in Log Management
3rd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.8
Number of Reviews
18
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Datadog is 5.7%, down from 6.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Grafana Loki is 7.9%, up from 6.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Log Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Grafana Loki7.9%
Datadog5.7%
Other86.4%
Log Management
 

Featured Reviews

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.
Volodymyr Bondarchuk - PeerSpot reviewer
Integrations enhance monitoring but problem-solving proves challenging
Different types of integrations with various sources are the most helpful and useful features of Grafana Loki that I found for myself. As part of Kubernetes technology, I noticed benefits from using this product such as availability, configuration balancing, high availability solutions for high performance, and failover clustering. It provides a clear picture about the state of the system and gives needed information for taking action and quickly fixing problems.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Datadog is providing efficiency in the products we develop for the wireless device engineering department."
"We find they have a very helpful alert system."
"The biggest thing I liked was the combination of all the things - monitoring, log aggregation, and profiling."
"The most valuable features have been: Sharable dashboards, TimeBoards, dogstatsd API, Slack Integration, Event logging API. CloudTrail Events, Tags, alerts, and anomaly detection. EBS Volume Snapshot Age, which they added upon request."
"The initial setup is very straightforward."
"The most valuable feature I have found is the elastic container service."
"We've found it most useful for managing Rstudio Workbench, which has its own logs that would not be picked up via Cloudwatch."
"It has empowered all our platform engineers with a very powerful and easy to use monitoring system."
"Loki significantly saves time in troubleshooting by quickly pinpointing network issues."
"Grafana Loki is easy to monitor and detect errors."
"The tool can be used in multi-cluster environments."
"The best feature of Grafana Loki is that it integrates well with our other tool."
"The product's most valuable features are ease of installation, management, and reporting. It has an efficient ability to set thresholds for alerts, as well."
"The most valuable part of Loki is the ability to filter logs by keywords and devices."
"Different types of integrations with various sources are the most helpful and useful features of Grafana Loki that I found for myself."
"The log collection feature is good and the solution is easily understandable. v"
 

Cons

"I would like better navigability across pages."
"I spent longer than I should have figuring out how to correlate logs to traces, mostly related to environmental variables."
"It can be overwhelming for new people as it has a lot of features."
"We need a lot of modules since we collect all data logs from all operating systems."
"One thing we have run into is that it is so easy to add monitoring that we turn on things without really understanding the costs."
"Lately, chat support has a longer waiting time."
"When the logs are too big, and Datadog splits them, the JSON format breaks and it is not so useful for us."
"The installation is easy for me. However, if you are new to this solution it might not be so easy."
"It's not intended for proprietary services, so you have to struggle with configuration a lot."
"We had a well-structured dashboard with a functional query. However, an issue arose when the Kubernetes pod restarted. The statistics from our Grafana query would reset, dropping to zero and starting anew. This was particularly noticeable with linear graphs, which are expected to show consistent growth."
"The correlation of requests is not simple in Grafana Loki and can be improved."
"The platform's stability needs improvement."
"The Docker container partition feature needs improvement as they do not reuse the space and goes into a pending state."
"In Grafana Loki, the creation of metrics is not so easy, making it an area that could be made easier."
"It would be beneficial if Loki could directly access Windows Server logs or events directly from the servers."
"The product must improve its UI."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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 tool is open-source."
"The price is better than some competing products."
"The price of Datadog is reasonable. Other solutions are more expensive, such as AppDynamics."
"This solution is budget friendly."
"My advice is to really keep an eye on your overage costs, as they can spiral really fast."
"It has a module-based pricing model."
"Pricing is somewhat affordable compared to other solutions but in order to really lower the costs of other products you need to plan very carefully your resources usage, otherwise, it can get expensive real quick."
"The cost is less than other paid services like CloudWatch."
"I find the licensing structure quite reasonable, as the free license effectively meets my requirements."
"Since we are using the open-source version of Grafana Loki, we are not paying anything for the solution."
"My company doesn't need to pay for the licensing cost of the solution."
"I use the solution's open-source version. Grafana Loki is a completely free solution for me."
"The pricing structure varies based on the number of users; there might be specific taxes to pay for it."
"The solution is open source."
"I use the open-source version of the product."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Retailer
6%
Computer Software Company
16%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business78
Midsize Enterprise42
Large Enterprise82
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise3
 

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 Grafana Loki?
We are using Grafana Loki as a database for real-time metrics.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Grafana Loki?
Since it is an open source tool, there are no charges or fees.
What needs improvement with Grafana Loki?
I have no ideas at this moment about what could be improved in Grafana Loki.
 

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. Grafana Loki and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
868,759 professionals have used our research since 2012.