Datadog vs. pfSense

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Datadog
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
Datadog is a monitoring service for IT, Dev and Ops teams who write and run applications at scale, and want to turn the massive amounts of data produced by their apps, tools and services into actionable insight.
$0
Up to 5 hosts
pfSense
Score 9.6 out of 10
N/A
pfSense is a firewall and load management product available through the open source pfSense Community Edition, as well as a the licensed edition, pfSense Plus (formerly known as pfSense Enterprise). The solution provides combined firewall, VPN, and router functionality, and can be deployed through the cloud (AWS or Azure), or on-premises with a Netgate appliance. It as scalable capacities, with functionality for SMBs. As a firewall, pfSense offers Stateful packet inspection, concurrent…
$179
per appliance
Pricing
DatadogpfSense
Editions & Modules
Free
$0
Up to 5 hosts
Log Management
$1.27
Per Million Log Events
Standard
$15/host
Up to 500 hosts
Infrastructure
$15.00
Per Host Per Month
APM
$31.00
Per Host Per Month
Enterprise
Custom
500+ hosts
SG-1100
$179
per appliance
SG-2100
$229
per appliance
SG-3100
$399
per appliance
SG-5100
$699
per appliance
XG-7100-DT
$899
per appliance
XG-7100-1U
$999
per appliance
XG-1537
$1,949
per appliance
XG-1541
$2,649
per appliance
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
DatadogpfSense
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Features
DatadogpfSense
Firewall
Comparison of Firewall features of Product A and Product B
Datadog
-
Ratings
pfSense
7.6
11 Ratings
12% below category average
Identification Technologies00 Ratings5.010 Ratings
Visualization Tools00 Ratings7.08 Ratings
Content Inspection00 Ratings4.011 Ratings
Policy-based Controls00 Ratings10.011 Ratings
Active Directory and LDAP00 Ratings7.09 Ratings
Firewall Management Console00 Ratings9.510 Ratings
Reporting and Logging00 Ratings8.011 Ratings
VPN00 Ratings10.011 Ratings
High Availability00 Ratings10.011 Ratings
Stateful Inspection00 Ratings7.011 Ratings
Proxy Server00 Ratings6.011 Ratings
Best Alternatives
DatadogpfSense
Small Businesses
InfluxDB
InfluxDB
Score 8.7 out of 10
Sophos UTM
Sophos UTM
Score 8.9 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
GitLab
GitLab
Score 8.6 out of 10
Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Firewalls - PA Series
Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Firewalls - PA Series
Score 9.5 out of 10
Enterprises
GitLab
GitLab
Score 8.6 out of 10
Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Firewalls - PA Series
Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Firewalls - PA Series
Score 9.5 out of 10
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User Ratings
DatadogpfSense
Likelihood to Recommend
9.0
(22 ratings)
9.7
(24 ratings)
Usability
10.0
(1 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
8.9
(6 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
DatadogpfSense
Likelihood to Recommend
Datadog
DataDog Is well suited to all of the Infrastructure Monitoring Solutions, DB monitoring, and other Network monitoring also. It's not well suited because it cannot give perfect Infrastructure recommendations for our use case but also For example: If we are using AWS DB to monitor performance insights then Datadog is less effective there because AWS gives very niche recommendations.
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Netgate (Rubicon Communications, LLC)
Because pfSense is built around open source software, it is very convenient to be able to deploy in the event of hardware failure. We once had a client with a proprietary router that failed. While the router was under warranty, the expected time for the new router to arrive was about 2 weeks. We decided to implement pfSense for the client as a stop gap and ultimately ended up deploying the full enterprise appliance. Being able to get up and running using commodity hardware was a huge win for the client. We've also had a great amount of success deploying pfSense hardware at apartment complexes. The DNS resolver works great and we've had no issues handling multiple VLANs with various DHCP scopes on it. Finally, we've had clients that require having a failover cluster. Utilizing the built in CARP capabilities, we've been able to provide a very robust failover system that requires little maintenance and no downtime in the event of equipment failure.
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Pros
Datadog
  • APIs, the ability to interact with the data we pull into data dog is key. We port the information over to Servicenow, so the ability to pull everything into DataDog, then Servicenow, is a key component of our success here at Wayfair.
  • Simple Interface - clean, useful, effective. Allows users to use DataDog for one reason, get work done.
  • Lightweight agent on hosts
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Netgate (Rubicon Communications, LLC)
  • Easy to use. Good user interface design! Easy to understand and easy to set up.
  • Lower hardware requirement. 3 years ago, we used an old PC to run it. Now, we have changed to a router device with Celeron CPU and 8GB RAM. It runs smoothly with a 1000G commercial broadband.
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Cons
Datadog
  • We had a couple "integrations" that had some issues during setup, but Support addressed them very quickly
  • Unnecessary alerts about DataDog components...by the time I see them, they're almost always also fixed
  • I wish there was a DataDog mobile app that would have dedicated alerts (configurable per alert to override Do Not Disturb setting) instead of relying on emails notifications that could be overlooked in the midst of many incoming emails around the same time.
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Netgate (Rubicon Communications, LLC)
  • I did kind of mention a Con in the Pro section with OpenVPN.
  • When I create a config for an employee other employees are able to login to that config.
  • I could be doing something wrong when I am making it - I am not afraid to admit that as I am pretty new to all of this, but it seems like it builds a key and I would think the key would be unique in some way to each employee, but I could be wrong.
  • I actually do not have a lot of Con's for this software - I did not get to set this up on our work network so I am not sure of any downfalls when installing.
  • I installed this on my personal machine in a Hyper-V environment to get a feel for it before I started working on it at work and it seemed pretty smooth. I didn't run into any issues.
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Usability
Datadog
The user interface is quite intuitive with the exception of the network map. As a deployer of software, it is trivial to setup.
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Netgate (Rubicon Communications, LLC)
The interface is simple, has sane defaults, and is consistent throughout.
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Support Rating
Datadog
The support team usually gets it right. We did have a rather complicate issue setting up monitoring on a domain controller. However, they are usually responsive and helpful over chat. The downside would be I don’t think they have any phone support. If that is important to you this might not be a good fit.
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Netgate (Rubicon Communications, LLC)
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
Datadog
We are still trying other products, but people still like Datadog. After setting up a dashboard, it's great for monitoring instances on Datadog. Also, the DevOps team had a good time setting up Datadog. It means Datadog was way easier to set up compared to those others.
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Netgate (Rubicon Communications, LLC)
While you can get the performance out of other products, pfSense offers the unique ability to put other services on the same device. Products such as Untagle's NG Firewall and SonicWall's TZ series offer cost effective options for firewall and VPN services, having incoming load balancing and connection proxies on the same device as the firewall offers extremely easy configuration and day to day management of network services
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Return on Investment
Datadog
  • Visibility into website issues and performance problems has improved our company communication.
  • Handling and detecting site issues faster has improved customer satisfaction and retention.
  • Configuration of the Datadog site can take a bit of time and we lost a bit of developer time during that process.
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Netgate (Rubicon Communications, LLC)
  • Using pfSense has allowed us to build a professional network in our small office without needing a lot of proprietary hardware, saving thousands of dollars in IT infrastructure investment.
  • The cost for using pfSense is free, so it's a great option for those who don't have a large IT budget
  • pfSense utilizes all of the industry standard services to provide all of it's functionality, so support for service-level issues is readily available
  • Because of how much work has been put into pfSense to make it rock solid and reliable, we're able to support our network with minimal IT staffing, saving us thousands of dollars/year in personnel alone.
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ScreenShots

Datadog Screenshots

Screenshot of Out-of-the-box and easily customizable monitoring dashboards.Screenshot of Datadog is built to give visibility across teams. You can discuss issues in-context with production data, annotate changes and notify your team, see who responded to that alert before, and remember what was done to fix it.Screenshot of Datadog seamlessly unifies traces, metrics, and logs—the three pillars of observability.Screenshot of Collect monitoring data from across your entire stack with Datadog's 400+ built-in integrations.Screenshot of Datadog's Service Map decomposes your application into all its component services and draws the observed dependencies between these services in real timeScreenshot of Centralize log data from any source.