Datadog vs. Prometheus

Datadog

228 Reviews and Ratings

Prometheus

92 Reviews and Ratings

Overview
Product	Rating	Most Used By	Product Summary	Starting Price
Datadog	Score 8.5 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
Prometheus	Score 8.1 out of 10	N/A	Prometheus is a service monitoring and time series database, which is open source.	N/A

Pricing

Datadog

Prometheus

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

No answers on this topic

Offerings

Pricing Offerings
Datadog	Prometheus
Free Trial
Yes	No
Free/Freemium Version
No	No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No	No

Entry-level Setup Fee

Optional

No setup fee

Additional Details

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More Pricing Information

Community Pulse
	Datadog	Prometheus
Considered Both Products	Datadog No answer on this topic	Prometheus Verified User Engineer Chose Prometheus We evaluated Datadog and New Relic but cost-wise, these 2 are very expensive. Prometheus does require more leg work to match the feature sets but other than time, the cost is free. Pairing with Grafana, Prometheus can pretty much match features with the big players and still … Incentivized Helpful? YG Yatin Garg Product Manager Chose Prometheus Highly customized pricing plans to choose from. Lower pricing for the same features compared to competitors. Easy to reach the support team, which provided detailed documentation and helped set up the Prometheus. Monitoring metrics gets very easy after the integration with … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Engineer Chose Prometheus Since Prometheus is free to use and provides all the features we required we went with Prometheus if any feature is missing then we can consider other paid solutions like data dog. Incentivized Helpful? Asad Khan Technical CARE Specialist Chose Prometheus Prometheus is best suited for Kubernetes metrics as compared to Zabbix. Incentivized Helpful? Prashant Chaudhari Head of Engineering & Founding team member Chose Prometheus Prometheus is cheaper, and you can quickly set it up compared to others. It is integrated with most of the open-source monitoring and alerting tools and can help small companies in having a cost-effective solution early in their stage. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Engineer Chose Prometheus Prometheus is similar to some of its competitors but delivers with regards to metrics; being used internally by Google and other cloud-native companies like ours gives us the confidence that the alerting industry stakeholders view it as a long-term solution that the community … Incentivized Helpful?
Top Pros	Pro Log management Pro Rest api Pro Application monitoring	Pro Open source
Top Cons	Minus Set up Minus Learning curve Minus Open source tools	Minus Difficult to learn

TrustRadius Insights
	Datadog	Prometheus
Highlights	Research Team Insight Published October 28, 2020 Datadog and Prometheus are IT service monitoring tools designed to give businesses insight into the performance of their hardware and software stacks. Datadog is a single-pane-of-glass solution with monitoring, alerting, data analysis, and visualization capabilities. Prometheus is a free open-source tool focused solely on monitoring and alerting. On TrustRadius, Datadog is used primarily by mid-sized companies, while Prometheus is primarily used by large enterprises. Features Although both Datadog and Prometheus have similar core functionality, their user experience and implementation are significantly different. Datadog is a professionally-supported product with plenty of visual analysis and quality-of-life features. Users on TrustRadius appreciate that it allows them to monitor performance, manage alerts, add and remove monitored resources, and analyze data from a single centralized application. Its data analysis tools in particular give customers multiple ways to view, manipulate, and understand the metrics generated by Datadog. The platform has a wealth of functionality available, and a wide array of officially-supported extensions add helpful features. A professional support team and strong user community help customers resolve any problems they may encounter. Prometheus, on the other hand, is a free open-source tool that focuses exclusively on monitoring and alerting. As a standalone application, Prometheus has a simple initial setup. It stores all scraped metrics in a database that can be searched with a query language to retrieve and evaluate performance data. Prometheus is extremely customizable, with several community-supported integrations and the freedom to create and tweak alerting rules as needed. Limitations Datadog and Prometheus won’t be the right solution for every business, as they have significantly different user experiences. Make sure you consider the limitations of each platform before committing to one or the other. According to reviewers on TrustRadius, Datadog can be overwhelming for new users. Its large array of functionality can be useful, but it can also be intimidating for new users. Overall, the platform requires significant user training and customization. Even experienced users have reported difficulty navigating the platform. Some features and edge cases lack sufficient documentation, necessitating a customer support ticket or a request for help from the community. Although Datadog’s price point is reasonable when compared to licensed competitor software, customers still have to pay per host, per GB of log data, or per log event. For smaller organizations, Datadog may very well be overkill. In comparison, Prometheus offers a classic open-source experience—for better or for worse. Users must be prepared to write code, create configuration files, and operate without a GUI. New users will also have to spend plenty of time learning how to use Prometheus. Since it is an open-source software with no professional support, users will need to rely on community documentation and support, which may be sparse or take time to get results from. Additionally, Prometheus relies on third-party applications for data visualization and analysis, requiring users to manually configure the dataflow from a monitored application to Prometheus, and then from Prometheus to other software. Finally, Prometheus has no built-in authentication or authorization features, relying on other tools to provide access security. Pricing Datadog offers several per-month pricing models designed to adapt to various operation scales and requirements. These models include pricing per host, per million log events, per function, per GB of analyzed log files, and per session. For more details on the available plans and pricing, refer to the Datadog pricing page. Prometheus is open-source and can be downloaded for free.

Best Alternatives
	Datadog	Prometheus
Small Businesses	InfluxDB Score 8.5 out of 10	InfluxDB Score 8.5 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies	IBM Instana Score 8.9 out of 10	No answers on this topic
Enterprises	IBM Instana Score 8.9 out of 10	No answers on this topic
All Alternatives	View all alternatives	View all alternatives

User Ratings
	Datadog	Prometheus
Likelihood to Recommend	9.1 (22 ratings)	8.2 (34 ratings)
Usability	10.0 (1 ratings)	- (0 ratings)
Support Rating	8.9 (6 ratings)	5.0 (1 ratings)

User Testimonials
	Datadog	Prometheus
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. Incentivized Aman Makwana DevOps Engineer Read full review	Open Source This program works from the roots of the problem and creates a professional matrix for each of its users. This will give them more skills and resources to carry out tasks and reduce the difficulties of operating each of the processes of my work, as well as being An ally for the manipulation and operability of all your master data; Prometheus is very easy to recommend since it is a program that fulfills its mission. Incentivized Mauricio Lozada System Engineer Read full review
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 Incentivized Anthony Zappala ServiceNow Lead Engineer/Architect Read full review	Open Source Best monitoring tool that have covered all aspects of our environment of my organization with it's useful metrics. Great support team offers support 24/7 and very dedicated. It provides excellent insights from a variety of metrics. Cloud native tools compatibility and support, push/pull options for easier metrics. Incentivized Pradeep Panwar Lead Mechanical Engineer Read full review
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. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	Open Source As I said earlier I have not encountered any major drawback just minor challenges like new users may find Prometheus a bit overwhelming with its different modules can bring confusion. Also they can face issues with PromQL can be somehow complex while building an advanced dashboard. Incentivized Candice Martinez Senior Designer Read full review
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. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	Open Source No answers on this topic
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. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	Open Source Never had to reach out to them. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
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. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	Open Source Highly customized pricing plans to choose from. Lower pricing for the same features compared to competitors. Easy to reach the support team, which provided detailed documentation and helped set up the Prometheus. Monitoring metrics gets very easy after the integration with Grafana. It also has a sophisticated alert setting mechanism to ensure we don't miss anything critical. Incentivized YG Yatin Garg Product Manager Read full review
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. Incentivized Kevin Van Heusen Software Architect Read full review	Open Source We are still working on the ROI The ROI mentioned during the purchase has not been achieved, however this could be due to lack of data from our side. 2 years of implementation is too early to calculate and confirm the ROI. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
ScreenShots	Datadog Screenshots