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Datadog vs Graylog 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)
Graylog
Ranking in Log Management
16th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
19
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 Graylog is 6.6%, up from 5.7% 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.
Andrey Mostovykh - PeerSpot reviewer
Real-time analysis, easy setup, and open source
We stopped using it for analytics because of its price, and at the moment, we are using it mostly for log centralization. If you use it with high traffic for analytical purposes, as well as for the logs, the infrastructure costs are unbelievable. Graylog is a great product backed by Elasticsearch as the storage and query engine. It is just an interface on top of Elasticsearch and some Elasticsearch management. The indexes that are kept in Elasticsearch are managed by Graylog software. Elasticsearch is a decent product, but it's very infrastructure-heavy. It requires lots of resources, and if you make a mistake with provisioning, you are likely to not get a cluster back. We had a couple of outages like that, and we hated that. So, we ended up over-provisioning resources just to avoid such situations from happening. If you have a whole team trying to fix the Graylog instance for two days, that's a bit too much. That may be my Norwegian take on it, but the engineering resources are expensive. It's better to just provision the infrastructure. Overall, the product is great, and the features are just fine, but the infrastructure cost is what is killing it. The infrastructure cost is the main issue. I like the rest. If the infrastructure costs could be lower, it would be fantastic. I'm not sure if they can improve the infrastructure cost with the way Elasticsearch is. If they keep using Elasticsearch, maybe there are some opportunities there, or they can support other backends with cheaper storage. They could have a different backend to replace Elasticsearch or do some tweaks to Elasticsearch to reduce the costs. There could be partial parsing of logs or parsing on demand so that when you write data through Graylog to Elasticsearch, it doesn't need to crunch in every detail requiring that much CPU.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I have found some of the most valuable features to be the way things all come together that gives us a point of view that is useful. The panel is very beautiful and customizable."
"Datadog agents act as an integration to different services, providing easy access and management."
"Real user monitoring has made triaging any possible bugs our users might face a lot easier."
"If we have a large load for users using our basic Datadog, it will immediately fire off an alert notifying us either something's wrong or not."
"The solution is sufficiently stable."
"Their interface is probably one of the easiest things to use because it lets non-developers and non-engineers quickly get access to metrics and pull business value out of them. We could put together dashboards and give it to people who are non-technical, then they can see the state of the world."
"By moving to Datadog, we did not need to manage our own monitoring infrastructure anymore."
"Datadog's seamless integration with Slack and PagerDuty helped us to receive alerts right to the most common notification methods we use (our mobile devices and Slack)."
"I am very proud of how very stable the solution is."
"We have scaled from a single machine installation (a VM with a Graylog + ES + MongoDB) to (2 Graylog + 2 ES + 3 MongoDB). This was done smoothly with a minimal impact on logging."
"It is used as a log manager/SIEM. It provides visibility into the infrastructure and security related events."
"We're using the Community edition, but I know that it has really good dashboarding and alerts."
"The solution's most valuable feature is its new interface."
"The best feature of Graylog is the Elasticsearch integration. We can integrate and we can run filters, such as an event of interest, and those logs we can send to any SIEM tool or as an analytic. Additionally, there are clear and well-documented implementation instructions on their website to follow if needed."
"The ability to write custom alerts is key to information security and compliance."
"UDP is a fast and lightweight protocol, perfect for sending large volumes of logs with minimal overhead."
 

Cons

"Delta traces on the Golang profiler are extremely expensive concerning memory utilization."
"Graph filters for logs need to be set manually which works well for JSON but not for unstructured logs."
"It is far too easy to run up huge unexpected costs."
"Sometimes, it takes a long time to load the dashboard if we have many charts."
"When it comes to storing the logs with Datadog, I'm not sure why it costs so much to store gigabytes or terabytes of information when it's a fraction of the cost to do so myself."
"Datadog isn't as mature as some of the established players like Dynatrace or Splunk. It's a new product, so they are constantly releasing new features, and I don't have much to complain about."
"We need a lot of modules since we collect all data logs from all operating systems."
"It does not have the best interface."
"Lacks sufficient documentation."
"The infrastructure cost is the main issue. I like the rest. If the infrastructure costs could be lower, it would be fantastic."
"It would be great if Graylog could provide a better Python package in order to make it easier to use for the Python community."
"I would like to see a default dashboard widget that shows the topology of the clusters defined for the graylog install."
"Since container orchestration systems are popular and Graylog fits the niche well, perhaps they could officially support running in docker containers on Kubernetes as a StatefulSet as a use case. That way, the declarative nature of Kubernetes config files would document their best case deployment scenario-"
"Graylog can improve the index rotation as it's quite a complex solution."
"With technical support, you are on your own without an enterprise license."
"When it comes to configuring the processing pipeline, writing the rules can be very tedious, especially since the documentation isn't extensive on how the functions provided for these rules work."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Datadog does not provide any free plans to use the solution. When I start with a proof of concept it would be sensible to have a free plan to test the tool and check whether it fits the requirements of the project. Before the production stage, it is always good to have a free plan with some limited features, number of requests, or logs."
"The price is better than some competing products."
"If you do your homework, you'll find that if you're really concerned with cost, it's good."
"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."
"Pricing seemed easy until the bill came in and some things were not accounted for."
"My advice is to really keep an eye on your overage costs, as they can spiral really fast."
"The tool is open-source."
"They prefer monthly subscriptions."
"There is an open source version and an enterprise version. I wouldn't recommend the enterprise version, but as an open source solution, it is solid and works really well."
"It's open source and free. They have a paid version, but we never looked into that because we never needed the features of the paid version."
"If you want something that works and do not have the money for Splunk or QRadar, take Graylog.​​"
"​You get a lot out-of-the-box with the non-enterprise version, so give it a try first."
"We're using the Community edition."
"We are using the free version of the product. However, the paid version is expensive."
"Consider Enterprise support if you have atypical needs or setup requirements.​"
"Graylog is a free open-source solution. The free version has a capacity limitation of 2 GB daily, if you want to go above this you have to purchase a license."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
37%
Computer Software Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
5%
Computer Software Company
17%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Government
8%
University
7%
 

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 Graylog?
The product is scalable. The solution is stable.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Graylog?
We are using the free version of the product. However, the paid version is expensive.
What needs improvement with Graylog?
When it comes to configuring the processing pipeline, writing the rules can be very tedious, especially since the documentation isn't extensive on how the functions provided for these rules work. P...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
Graylog2
 

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
Blue Cross Blue Shield, eBay, Cisco, LinkedIn, SAP, King.com, Twilio, Deutsche Presse-Agentur
Find out what your peers are saying about Datadog vs. Graylog and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
845,485 professionals have used our research since 2012.