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Datadog vs Netdata 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 IT Infrastructure Monitoring
2nd
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
1st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
210
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (1st), Network Monitoring Software (4th), Log Management (4th), Container Monitoring (3rd), AIOps (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (5th), AI Observability (1st)
Netdata
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
33rd
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
21st
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
8.7
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
Server Monitoring (16th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the IT Infrastructure Monitoring category, the mindshare of Datadog is 3.7%, down from 5.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Netdata is 1.1%, up from 1.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
IT Infrastructure Monitoring Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Datadog3.7%
Netdata1.1%
Other95.2%
IT Infrastructure Monitoring
 

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.
Yess Kumar - PeerSpot reviewer
SRE at a tech vendor with 5,001-10,000 employees
Real-time monitoring has improved incident detection and simplifies per-second troubleshooting
The key area for improvement is data retention and historical analysis. Netdata is excellent for real-time monitoring, but for long-term storage and deep historical insights, it usually needs to be integrated with other tools. Improving built-in long-term retention would make it more complete. Another area I see is data aggregation, where it correlates multiple nodes; while it provides great per-node visibility, having more advanced centralized views and correlations across systems would help in larger-scale environments. Customization of alerts and anomaly detection could also be enhanced. One area needing improvement is access control and security features. Stronger RBAC and user management would help control who can view data. Another area would be customization of dashboards, alerting integrations, and improving enterprise-level scalability features.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Its integration is most valuable because you can integrate it with various service providers such as AWS, .Net, etc."
"Synthetic testing has been a game-changer, allowing us to catch potential problems before they impact real users."
"The many dozens of integrations that the solution brings out of the box are excellent."
"Datadog has given us near-live visibility across our entire cloud platform."
"The most useful feature is the APM."
"The interface and the integrations make it so easy to connect to the cloud or to the on-premise environment."
"Datadog's learning platform is second to none."
"Our return on investment is great and is so much better than CloudWatch."
"The biggest ROI I have seen is in incident detection, with improvements of forty to fifty percent, troubleshooting time by thirty to forty percent, and productivity gains of around twenty-five to thirty percent."
 

Cons

"I sometimes log in and see items changed, either in the UI or a feature enabled. To see it for the first time without proper communication can sometimes come as a shock."
"I find the training great. That said, it is set for the LCD (lowest common denominator)."
"It would also be nice if we had more insight into our own usage of Datadog (agents and custom metrics). They provide a usage page which does help, but it is not in real-time."
"This service could be less costly."
"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."
"I've only been using Datadog for a few months, and at first, it was frankly overwhelming in terms of both the UI and the available capabilities."
"The solution needs to integrate AI tools."
"Datadog has a lot of features kind of cramped into one dashboard. It's quite hard to get around what feature does exactly what. There was a steep learning curve, trying to navigate through menus."
"The key area for improvement is data retention and historical analysis."
 

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."
"They prefer monthly subscriptions."
"While it is an expensive product, I would rate the pricing level at four out of five."
"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."
"It has a module-based pricing model."
"The solution's pricing depends on project volume."
"It is easy to run up a large bill, so become familiar with the cost of each piece of your bill and use the metrics they supply to estimate and monitor your bill."
"It costs the same amount it would if we were hosting it ourselves, so we are incredibly happy with the cost."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
6%
Transportation Company
66%
Comms Service Provider
6%
Computer Software Company
4%
Construction Company
3%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business82
Midsize Enterprise47
Large Enterprise100
No data available
 

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 Netdata?
As I am going with the subscription-based model in the SaaS, the pricing and setup cost are very nice, and the setup is very easy since I am running the server inside GCP.
What needs improvement with Netdata?
The key area for improvement is data retention and historical analysis. Netdata is excellent for real-time monitoring, but for long-term storage and deep historical insights, it usually needs to be...
What is your primary use case for Netdata?
I have been using Netdata for the past one and a half years, mainly for real-time monitoring and quick visibility into system performance. During this time, I have used it to monitor CPU, memory, d...
 

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 Zabbix, Datadog, Auvik and others in IT Infrastructure Monitoring. Updated: April 2026.
893,221 professionals have used our research since 2012.