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Datadog vs SolarWinds Pingdom 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 (4th), Container Monitoring (3rd), Cloud Monitoring Software (1st), AIOps (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (5th), AI Observability (1st)
SolarWinds Pingdom
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
70th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.0
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Datadog is 4.4%, down from 9.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds Pingdom is 0.6%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Datadog4.4%
SolarWinds Pingdom0.6%
Other95.0%
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.
Jay Vekaria - PeerSpot reviewer
Linux System Administrator at Ergode
High performance, quick setup, but lacking ease of use
Some of the functions could improve by making them easier. There is room for improvement when it comes to the graphs provided by the software. Additionally, there seems to be an issue with the ping status, as it sometimes indicates that a website is down even when it is functioning properly. It appears that there are certain aspects related to cache management or other backend functionalities that are unclear. The time range graph and overall user interface could be more user-friendly. For example, when selecting a custom graph for a specific time period, clicking on it should open the corresponding website in a new tab, but instead, it displays the current graph. This lack of consistency can be frustrating when trying to navigate the interface. Furthermore, the reports shared on a weekly basis arrive one week late, reducing their usefulness. Overall, some extra efforts are required to make the user experience smoother and more efficient.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"We can handle debugging and find out why things are breaking in our applications."
"Being able to filter requests by latency is invaluable, as it provides immediate insight into which endpoints require further analysis and optimization."
"Real user monitoring has made triaging any possible bugs our users might face a lot easier."
"The infrastructure monitoring capabilities, especially for our Kubernetes clusters, have helped us optimize resource allocation and reduce costs."
"When I reflect on the ways we used to track down issues, I can't imagine how we ever managed before Datadog."
"I like how we can customize alerts, and when alerts have become too noisy, we turn their threshold down fairly easily."
"Because of our client focus, it is easy for us to sell. This is because it is easy to use and easy to set up."
"The installation step is pretty straightforward."
"One notable feature of this software is its page speed setup, which is highly commendable. Additionally, the metrics it provides are also impressive."
"Overall, this is a very good product and one that I recommend."
"One valuable feature is real user monitoring."
"The most valuable features are monitoring and reporting."
"There are alerting mechanisms in place to let us know, for example, if a device is not responding to a ping test and is probably not going to work."
"Once you set the threshold on your environment, it feels very real-time"
"My advice to anybody who is considering Pingdom is that this is a good product at an affordable price."
 

Cons

"They could have better log reporting."
"I'd like to see better pricing and more integration in the next release."
"Datadog could always lower the price!"
"It can be overwhelming for new people as it has a lot of features."
"We have contact with many customers that cover many areas, so we have cases where the infrastructure administration could be improved."
"The solution needs to integrate AI tools."
"The pricing model could be simplified as it feels a bit outdated, especially when you look at the billing model of compute instances vs the containers instances."
"One of the improvement opportunities that we have identified in my project concerns how hard it is to manage an organizational structure when you have multiple things in one organization, and you want to provide some kind of isolation between them."
"Pingdom is always improving everything in its product. So, they should work on the GUI."
"Technical support could use some improvement."
"Some of the functions could improve by making them easier."
"I would like to see better integration with other products."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The tool is open-source."
"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."
"​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."
"They prefer monthly subscriptions."
"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."
"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 of Datadog is reasonable. Other solutions are more expensive, such as AppDynamics."
"Licensing is based on the retention period of logs and metrics."
"While I wouldn't describe it as excessively expensive, if you require specific and reliable monitoring, SolarWinds can be a suitable option. The advantage is that SolarWinds offers a free version as well. If you don't heavily rely on its monitoring capabilities and are content with its basic features, the free version could suffice for your needs."
"This price of this solution is reasonable."
"The license was paid yearly and included technical support."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Outsourcing Company
6%
Construction Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business82
Midsize Enterprise49
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 ...
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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
Spotify, MailChimp, Slack, Twitter
Find out what your peers are saying about Datadog vs. SolarWinds Pingdom and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
908,858 professionals have used our research since 2012.