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Datadog vs Graylog Enterprise comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 14, 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
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 (1st), Cloud Monitoring Software (2nd), AIOps (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (5th), AI Observability (1st)
Graylog Enterprise
Ranking in Log Management
8th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
5.4
Number of Reviews
24
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Datadog is 4.5%, down from 6.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Graylog Enterprise is 4.4%, down from 6.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Log Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Datadog4.5%
Graylog Enterprise4.4%
Other91.1%
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.
NC
Security Officer at JSC "Moldtelecom" S.A.
Log analysis has become clearer and faster but visualization and extensibility still need work
The problem was with the complexity and the cost to add extensions. We found this very expensive to buy another version with additional features. I think that Graylog Enterprise does not have customizable dashboards. I did not see them in Graylog Enterprise because most of the time we used the open source free version, which is limited. I think Graylog Enterprise should improve some things that they have in the paid version and perhaps provide users with a menu that gives examples of parsing logs and draws graphics so that people do not need to improve another system such as Grafana. This would be interesting. When it comes to functionalities, I found the log management in Graylog Enterprise acceptable. It is very simple to use and to collect logs. It has support for different protocols and different ports, and the sidecar is easy to use. However, in visualization, I think it needs to be much better.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The single pane of glass view with maneuvering between products has helped us to truly understand root causes after incidents."
"Datadog provides tracing and logging, whereas Dynatrace focuses on tracing, and Splunk is more of a logging tool. Datadog's advantage is that we don't need two tools."
"Thanks to the logs, we manage to make better reports through Jira and also to trace the request with more facility than we would be able to do otherwise."
"The tools are powerful and intuitive to set up."
"Datadog's ability to group and visualize the servers and the data makes it relatively easy for the root cause analysis."
"Datadog has impacted our organization positively in a major way because not even just as a QA engineer having access to the real-time replay, but just as a team, all of us being able to access this data and see what parts of our system are causing the most errors or resulting in the most frustration with users."
"The selection of monitors is a big feature I have been working with."
"Datadog has impacted our organization positively because the general feeling is that it's superior to the ELK stack that we used to use, being significantly faster in searching and filtering the information down, as well as providing links to our search criteria that our development teams and cloud operations teams can use to look at the same problems without having to set up their own search and filter criteria."
"It is used as a log manager/SIEM. It provides visibility into the infrastructure and security related events."
"Open source and user friendly."
"It has data adapters and lookup tables that utilize HTTP calls to APIs."
"Graylog is valuable because it bridges technical knowledge to non-technical teams, presenting complex backend processes in a simple timeline."
"The ability to write custom alerts is key to information security and compliance."
"Troubleshooting is straightforward with Graylog Enterprise."
"Real-time UDP/GELF logging and full text-based searching."
"Everything stands out as valuable, including the fact that I can quantify and qualify the logs, create pipelines and process the logs in any way I like, and create charts or data maps."
 

Cons

"The UI has a lot going on. It should be simpler and have a better way to onboard someone new to using Datadog."
"It could use some additional features when working with metrics like Grafana or like New Relic has. Datadog does not use library technologies like Dynatrace does. Datadog has machine learning too, but it does not have this option in all layers of monitoring like infrastructure service process in applications."
"Datadog is too pricey when compared to its competitors, and this is something that its always on my mind during the decision-making process."
"The largest pain point we've had with Datadog to this point was onboarding."
"The on-premise version is very difficult to upgrade."
"One key improvement we would like to see in a future Datadog release is the inclusion of certain metrics that are currently unavailable. Specifically, the ability to monitor CPU and memory utilization of AWS-managed Airflow workers, schedulers, and web servers would be highly beneficial for our organization."
"Managing dashboards as IaC is a bit hard to work out at times."
"​It would be nice to be able to graph metrics by excluding certain tags (like you can do in monitors)."
"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."
"Elasticsearch recommendations for tuning could be better. Graylog doesn't have direct support for running the system inside of Kubernetes, so it can be challenging to fill in the gaps and set up containers in a way that is both performant and stable."
"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."
"I would like to see a date and time in the Graylog Grok patterns so that I can save time when searching for a log. I like how the streams and the search query work, but adding a date and time will allow me to pull out a log in a milli-second."
"Graylog needs to improve their authentication. Also, the fact that Graylog displays logs from the top down is just ridiculous."
"I would like to see some kind of visualization included in Graylog."
"Graylog can improve the index rotation as it's quite a complex solution."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"They prefer monthly subscriptions."
"It costs the same amount it would if we were hosting it ourselves, so we are incredibly happy with the cost."
"It didn't scale well from the cost perspective. We had a custom package deal."
"While it is an expensive product, I would rate the pricing level at four out of five."
"My advice is to really keep an eye on your overage costs, as they can spiral really fast."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"If you want something that works and do not have the money for Splunk or QRadar, take Graylog.​​"
"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."
"We are using the free version of the product. However, the paid version is expensive."
"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."
"It's an open-source solution that can be used free of charge."
"We're using the Community edition."
"I am using a community edition. I have not looked at the enterprise offering from Graylog."
"Consider Enterprise support if you have atypical needs or setup requirements.​"
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
6%
Computer Software Company
14%
Comms Service Provider
11%
University
9%
Government
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 Enterprise5
Large Enterprise9
 

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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Graylog?
I am not familiar with the pricing details of Graylog, as I was not responsible for that aspect. It was determined that we didn't need an enterprise plan, which is more suited for clients with less...
What needs improvement with Graylog?
I do not have any specific examples or numbers, such as time saved or incidents to share. Currently, I have no suggestions for how Graylog Enterprise can be improved, as there are no pain points or...
What is your primary use case for Graylog?
Graylog Enterprise is the logging and management tool we initially used, but later we stopped using it and switched to Loki, Grafana Loki for the logs. Eventually, we moved back to Graylog Enterpri...
 

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 Enterprise and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
881,707 professionals have used our research since 2012.