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Datadog vs Instana Dynamic APM 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 Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
1st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
211
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (3rd), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (2nd), Log Management (3rd), Container Monitoring (2nd), Cloud Monitoring Software (2nd), AIOps (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (5th), AI Observability (1st)
Instana Dynamic APM
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
30th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Datadog is 5.5%, down from 9.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Instana Dynamic APM is 1.0%, down from 1.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Datadog5.5%
Instana Dynamic APM1.0%
Other93.5%
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

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.
Muhammad Jawwad Hassan - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Consultant at Arcana Info
A really good GUI that is easy for non-technical users to understand
Our company uses the solution for one of our bank clients. We use App Connect middleware to monitor services and applications such as Docker, Kubernetes, MongoDB, and MS SQL Server. We also monitor the bottleneck for all servers.  We currently have 20 users at one of our branches. We plan to expand…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"The integration and configuration are incredibly simple. The SaaS offering is remarkably easy to set up, especially if you're coming from a Graphite environment or anything that uses a StatsD."
"Our teams use Datadog more than they used their old observability tool—they're more production-aware, conscious of how their changes are impacting customers, how the changes they make to their application speed up or slow down their app, and the overall request flow."
"Datadog has positively impacted my organization by making finding and resolving issues a lot easier and efficient."
"The most valuable aspects of the solution include log search to help triage specific problems that we get notified about (whether by alerts we have configured or users that have contacted us)."
"The initial setup is very straightforward."
"Profiling has been made easier."
"Datadog has positively impacted our organization because our customers are very happy using it."
"It is a stable solution."
"We can easily perform root cause analysis using the tool."
"With Instana, the interface and the UI are very simple to use."
"The platform’s most valuable feature is the ability to monitor the performance of containers for request and response analysis."
"With auto-discovery, we didn't need to consider much. We just installed the agent on the host and it was able to detect everything from the host level up to the service level, for whatever stack was installed, and that includes containers and dockers."
"The overall capabilities are the most valuable."
"The most valuable feature of Instana Dynamic APM is auto-instrumentation."
"If a key monitored value has crossed a threshold, it sends out an alert. And the solution is able to intelligently find out if something is beyond the range that it normally resides in."
 

Cons

"The menu on the left is pretty dense (and I know it has to be). I never knew about the cmd+k functionality until recently. It would be helpful to offer more tips/cheat sheets to see handy shortcuts like that."
"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 query performance could be improved, particularly when handling large datasets, as slower response times can hinder efficiency."
"While the UI and search functionality are excellent, further improvement could be made in the querying of logs by offering more advanced templates or suggestions based on common use cases."
"I find the setup cost to be too expensive. The setup cost for Datadog is more than $100. I am evaluating the usage of this solution, however, it is too expensive."
"I think Datadog can be improved by continually finding errors and making things easy to see and customize."
"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."
"They need to offer better/more customization on what logs we get and making tracing possible on Edge runtime logs is a real requirement."
"The solution's monitoring is pretty weak and should be improved."
"Its SLI and SLA features need improvement in setting up alerts."
"New Relic has a better UI in terms of how it presents the data."
"I think that Instana should improve the university and the certification process, so the users can find experts in Instana with their certification module process."
"The auto-remediation features must be improved."
"The integration could be improved with more plugins or open API."
"The configuration of Instana Dynamic APM needs improvement because it requires quite a bit of work."
"Sometimes, the issue arises from user changes, such as adjusting firewall settings without proper consideration, leading to compatibility issues within the network monitoring."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"While it is an expensive product, I would rate the pricing level at four out of five."
"Licensing is based on the retention period of logs and metrics."
"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."
"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 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."
"The cost is high and this can be justified if the scale of the environment is big."
"It costs the same amount it would if we were hosting it ourselves, so we are incredibly happy with the cost."
"If you do your homework, you'll find that if you're really concerned with cost, it's good."
"The pricing is $1,200 per year which is a bit high compared to other vendors."
"Its pricing isn't a big pain point. Its pricing seems to be better than some of the other competing products in the market, but they also have some of the features and functionalities that are better than Instana."
"Pricing is quite competitive. Dynatrace, AppDynamics, and New Relic were all several times more expensive than Instana, both the on-prem and the SaaS versions. Price-wise they are a lot more competitive than anyone else out there."
"Instana Dynamic APM is more affordable for small and medium-sized companies compared to other vendors."
"The solution's pricing is comparable to other products."
"The solution is less expensive than one of its competitors."
"It's reasonably priced and manageable, especially for individuals who grasp the significance of application monitoring."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
25%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Computer Software Company
6%
Retailer
6%
 

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 Business3
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise5
 

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 Instana Dynamic APM?
The platform’s most valuable feature is the ability to monitor the performance of containers for request and response analysis.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Instana Dynamic APM?
I rate the pricing a seven out of ten. There are no additional costs associated with the product.
What needs improvement with Instana Dynamic APM?
Sometimes, the issue arises from user changes, such as adjusting firewall settings without proper consideration, leading to compatibility issues within the network monitoring.
 

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
Daxko Lifts Fitness Studios Through COVID Regulations with Quick Engineering PivotsAltissia Meets SLAs to Support Student DeadlinesImmocloud Unlocks Observability to Modernize Real EstateEnento Group Boosts Service Reliability with Real-Time Visibility into Application Performance Instana’s Observability for Amazon EKS Helps Yara Deliver Digital Farming Solutions
Find out what your peers are saying about Datadog vs. Instana Dynamic APM and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.