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

Datadog vs Grafana Loki comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 5, 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
3rd
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 (3rd), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (2nd), Container Monitoring (1st), Cloud Monitoring Software (1st), AIOps (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (7th)
Grafana Loki
Ranking in Log Management
4th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
8.0
Number of Reviews
17
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Datadog is 6.1%, down from 8.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Grafana Loki is 8.5%, up from 3.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Log Management
 

Featured Reviews

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.
CarlosPimentel - PeerSpot reviewer
Efficient log filtering enhances quick network troubleshooting
We use Grafana Loki for various verticals including manufacturing, finance, health, and aerospatial sectors. It primarily helps in monitoring security and access to devices. Grafana dashboards are used to track access success and failure and audit commands issued on devices Loki significantly…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It has empowered all our platform engineers with a very powerful and easy to use monitoring system."
"I like the amount of tooling and the number of solutions they sold with their monitoring. Datadog was highly intuitive to use."
"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 visibility that it provides is valuable. It is helping in being proactive around incident management. It is helping us to be able to get more visibility into our customers' applications so that we can assist them at the application layer. We also provide them the infrastructure from an AWS standpoint. We are able to make sure that our customers are aware of certain critical things around the analytical piece of either the network or the application. We're able to call customers before they even know about the issue. From there, we can start putting together some change management processes and help them a bit."
"I like that you can build out a dashboard pretty quickly. There are some things that come out of the box that you don't really need to do, which is great because they're default settings."
"Datadog has helped us a ton by allowing us to set up a multitude of easily configurable alarms across our tech stack and infrastructure."
"The solution has helped out organization gain improved visibility."
"The two most valuable aspects are the Terraform provider for Datadog and the K8s Orchestrator."
"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 feature of the solution is the tool's GUI. The solution's GUI is very user-friendly."
"The most valuable feature is the capability to set up alerts, which becomes necessary when we need to receive notifications for specific events."
"There are new features like that pilot code and things like that for profiling."
"The tool can be used in multi-cluster environments."
"The effectiveness of filters is pivotal for optimizing the search process and extracting the specific information we need from the extensive log data."
"Loki also utilizes the same service discovery mechanism as used by Prometheus. So, whatever labeled metadata you see in Prometheus, you have the exact same metadata in the Loki system. Given this level of intricacy and the attempt to address these challenges, I firmly believe that Loki deserves praise for the work."
"Grafana Loki is easy to monitor and detect errors."
 

Cons

"Network device and performance monitoring could be improved, as we've faced some limitations in this area."
"The monitors need improvement."
"The monitors can be improved."
"We need more visibility into the error tracking dashboard."
"Federated views for Datadog dashboards are critical as large companies utilize multiple instances of the product and cannot link the metrics or correlate the metrics together. This stunts the usage of Datadog."
"The FinOps needs improvement."
"The cost does add up quickly, so it can be some effort to justify the necessary outlay to those paying the bills."
"We need more integration with security tools like Drata."
"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."
"It's not intended for proprietary services, so you have to struggle with configuration a lot."
"We encountered certain limitations when it came to alerting, particularly when dealing with specific data sources."
"The Docker container partition feature needs improvement as they do not reuse the space and goes into a pending state."
"Enhancing speed could be a game-changer, and while it might vary depending on the application, it's a factor worth exploring."
"We face some bugs when we install the latest version of Grafana Loki."
"My main concern is the recommended production-grade setup. They suggest using tools like Tanka or Jsonnet. They should simplify the process to increase adoption."
"Visualization-wise, Grafana Loki's dashboard looks a little outdated compared to other open-source visualization tools like Chronograf."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of Datadog is reasonable. Other solutions are more expensive, such as AppDynamics."
"The cost is high and this can be justified if the scale of the environment is big."
"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."
"Pricing seemed easy until the bill came in and some things were not accounted for."
"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 is fairly priced but history and log storage can get costly depending on your needs."
"​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 didn't scale well from the cost perspective. We had a custom package deal."
"Grafana Loki is an open-source solution."
"Grafana Loki is a free, open-source solution."
"You can use the free version of Grafana Loki on-premises."
"Since we are using the open-source version of Grafana Loki, we are not paying anything for the solution."
"The cost is less than other paid services like CloudWatch."
"I use the solution's open-source version. Grafana Loki is a completely free solution for me."
"I find the licensing structure quite reasonable, as the free license effectively meets my requirements."
"I use the open-source version of the product."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Log Management solutions are best for your needs.
845,406 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
37%
Computer Software Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
5%
Computer Software Company
18%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

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?
We use the open-source version of Loki. The cloud version is competitively priced compared to other market solutions.
What needs improvement with Grafana Loki?
It would be beneficial if Loki could directly access Windows Server logs or events directly from the servers.
 

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
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Datadog vs. Grafana Loki and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
845,406 professionals have used our research since 2012.