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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
7.0
Number of Reviews
209
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (3rd), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (2nd), Log Management (4th), Container Monitoring (1st), 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
64th
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 March 2026, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Datadog is 5.2%, down from 9.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds Pingdom is 0.5%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Datadog5.2%
SolarWinds Pingdom0.5%
Other94.3%
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

"Real user monitoring has made triaging any possible bugs our users might face a lot easier."
"Synthetic testing has been a game-changer, allowing us to catch potential problems before they impact real users."
"For us to have visibility into our app stack and the hardware we run has been highly beneficial."
"The solution has improved the organization by providing good insights into app performance and offering good dashboards."
"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."
"Datadog has flexibility."
"The solution is useful for monitoring logs."
"It has scaled great. I haven't run into any problems anywhere that I've used it. They have handled everything that we have needed them to."
"Once you set the threshold on your environment, it feels very real-time"
"One notable feature of this software is its page speed setup, which is highly commendable. Additionally, the metrics it provides are also impressive."
"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."
 

Cons

"The cost is pretty high."
"Deploying the agents is still very manual."
"I found the documentation can sometimes be confusing."
"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."
"I would like the tooling to have better integration in Slack, specifically sending out reminders to the relevant people to take breaks, do a retrospective, and specify with emojis which messages to log."
"The on-premise version is very difficult to upgrade."
"Once Datadog has gained wide adoption, it can often be overwhelming to both know and understand where to go to find answers to questions."
"We need more advanced querying against logs."
"Technical support could use some improvement."
"Some of the functions could improve by making them easier."
"Pingdom is always improving everything in its product. So, they should work on the GUI."
"I would like to see better integration with other products."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Licensing is based on the retention period of logs and metrics."
"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."
"Pricing and licensing are reasonable for what they give you. You get the first five hosts free, which is fun to play around with. Then it's about four dollars a month per host, which is very affordable for what you get out of it. We have a lot of hosts that we put a lot of custom metrics into, and every host gives you an allowance for the number of custom metrics."
"​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."
"It didn't scale well from the cost perspective. We had a custom package deal."
"My advice is to really keep an eye on your overage costs, as they can spiral really fast."
"Pricing seemed easy until the bill came in and some things were not accounted for."
"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."
"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%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Educational Organization
10%
Government
10%
University
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business81
Midsize Enterprise46
Large Enterprise99
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: March 2026.
884,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.