Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Datadog
Score 8.6 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.
$18
per month per host
Prometheus
Score 8.0 out of 10
N/A
Prometheus is a service monitoring and time series database, which is open source.N/A
Pricing
DatadogPrometheus
Editions & Modules
Log Management
$1.27
per month (billed annually) per host
Infrastructure
$15.00
per month (billed annually) per host
Standard
$18
per month per host
Enterprise
$27
per month per host
DevSecOps Pro
$27
per month per host
APM
$31.00
per month (billed annually) per host
DevSecOps Enterprise
$41
per month per host
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
DatadogPrometheus
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalNo setup fee
Additional DetailsDiscount available for annual pricing. Multi-Year/Volume discounts available (500+ hosts/mo).
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
DatadogPrometheus
Considered Both Products
Datadog
Chose Datadog
Dynatrace was cheaper but, in my opinion, its setup, features, and overall user experience do not come close to what Datadog can offer, making it more of a pain to use and not worth the cheaper cost over Datadog (especially if migrating away from Datadog to Dynatrace).

Grafana/…
Chose Datadog
we primarily use Kubernetes, and Prometheus is great for collecting time series metrics, especially in Kubernetes. and Grafana is used for dashboards. As these are open source, we host them and manage them internally. We choose Datadog because of its logs, traces, and …
Chose Datadog
Its the Enterprise level decision, definitely usability and features perspective Datadog is much more advanced.
Chose Datadog
I use Datadog because it concentrates all these features into a single tool, facilitating the learning curve that my platform and development engineering team needs in order to be able to set up the monitors/alerts/SLIs/SLOs as well as to diagnose a production issue. Its easier …
Chose Datadog
Datadog is best for cloud-native and fast-setup. It is more mature for infrastructure and real-time observability. The UI is more user-friendly and provides wide coverage of app insights.
Chose Datadog
All other tools dont have all the features which Datadog provides.
Easy to use from UI where other may have complicated UI or no UI at all to create monitors. Consider like AWS Grafana, we have limitation to create monitors from UI. There is no recurring downtime for monitors. …
Prometheus
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 …
Chose Prometheus
It is easier to setup, but learning curve is quite moderately steep. Prometheus is a best-in-class tool for engineers and SREs in cloud-native environments. When extended with tools like Thanos or Cortex, it can rival commercial platforms in scale and capability—but requires …
Chose Prometheus
As I mentioned earlier, Prometheus had an added advantage that we were able to monitor CPU, RAM, Disk Space, process monitoring which other tools did not provide us
Some tools were obsolete, and other were costly when we wanted this good feature , only Prometheus delivered on …
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 …
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.
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.
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 …
TrustRadius Insights
DatadogPrometheus
Highlights

TrustRadius
Research Team Insight
Published

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
DatadogPrometheus
Small Businesses
InfluxDB
InfluxDB
Score 8.8 out of 10
InfluxDB
InfluxDB
Score 8.8 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Sumo Logic
Sumo Logic
Score 8.8 out of 10

No answers on this topic

Enterprises
NetBrain Technologies
NetBrain Technologies
Score 9.2 out of 10

No answers on this topic

All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
DatadogPrometheus
Likelihood to Recommend
9.4
(55 ratings)
7.7
(35 ratings)
Usability
9.2
(34 ratings)
6.7
(3 ratings)
Support Rating
8.9
(6 ratings)
5.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
DatadogPrometheus
Likelihood to Recommend
Datadog
As per my experience, Datadog is best suited for complex, cloud-native environments where unified observability is critical, as it integrates seamlessly with AWS and Azure. Moreover, it provides deep visibility into latency and error rates. Datadog pricing is less appropriate for Startups with a tight budget and for organizations needing advanced incident management.
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.
Read full review
Pros
Datadog
  • The thing which Datadog does really well, one of them are its broad range of services integrations and features which makes it one step observability solution for all. We can monitor all types of our application, infrastructure, hosts, databases etc with Datadog.
  • Its custom dashboard feature which helps us to visualize the data in a better way . It supports different types of charts through those charts we can create our dashboard more attractive.
  • Its AI powered alerting capability though that we can easily identify the root cause and also it has a low noise alerting capability which means it correlated the similar type of issues.
Read full review
Open Source
  • Looking at metrics such as the aggregate number of HTTP requests served.
  • Understanding how our services are performing in aggregate.
  • Easy to deploy within a variety of architectures/environments.
  • Open source so new features are added regularly and bugs are fixed in a timely manner.
  • Free so there are no licensing restrictions.
  • Endorsed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.
Read full review
Cons
Datadog
  • In my experience, .NET Tracing Agent caused severe and untraceable performance issues
  • In my opinion, usage and billing structures were opaque and surprising
  • In my experience, documentation was incomplete, contradicting or sometimes completely wrong, even for common infrastructure (AWS Fargate)
  • I feel support was unhelpful at times, and bounced us back and forth to other teams
  • In my opinion, multiple methods of sample rate control were ineffective, adding to excessive usage and cost
Read full review
Open Source
  • Customer Service: since this is an open-source tool, customer service is not that great. Generally, you get all answers to your problems in online forums, but in case you got stuck, nobody will assist you in a channelised manner. You will have to find the way out on your own, and it may become frustrating at times.
  • More metrics for dashboards shall be added per the application being monitored. Standards metrics will work in most cases but may not in specific applications. Therefore, customised metrics shall be created for some of the industry-standard niche applications.
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
Datadog
Definitely will not revisit after our issues and, in my opinion, poor support.
Read full review
Open Source
No answers on this topic
Usability
Datadog
There are so many features that it can be hard to figure out where you need to go for your own use case. For example, RUM monitoring us buried in a "Digital Experience" sidebar setting when this is one of our key use cases that I sometimes struggle to find in the application. It appears that ECS + Fargate monitoring was recently released which is great because we had to build a lambda reporting solution for ephemeral task monitoring. But this new feature was never on my radar until I starting clicking around the application.
Read full review
Open Source
It is usable and one can learn if few people in the team are already using it. It can be difficult to understand at the beginning because of non intuitive UI and syntax of the rules. So, I've gone for 7 points as there is some room for improvement in user interface and rules syntax.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
Open Source
Never had to reach out to them.
Read full review
Implementation Rating
Datadog
Documentation was difficult to work through, rollout was catastrophic (completely outage)
Read full review
Open Source
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
Datadog
Our logs are very important, and Datadog manages them exceptionally well. We frequently use Datadog services for our investigations. Use case: Monitor your apps, infrastructure, APIs, and user experience.


Key features:


Logs, metrics, and APM (Application Performance Monitoring)


Real-time alerting and dashboards


Supports Kubernetes, AWS, GCP, and other integrations


RUM (Real User Monitoring) and Synthetics





✅ Best for backend, server, and distributed systems monitoring.
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.
Read full review
Return on Investment
Datadog
  • Saved us (time & money) from developing our own monitoring utilities that would pale in comparison
  • Alerts allow us to remedy issues before our customers even know about them
  • Tracking resource usage over time allows us to better plan for future needs, before it becomes a pain-point.
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.
Read full review
ScreenShots

Datadog Screenshots

Screenshot of the out-of-the-box and customizable monitoring dashboards.Screenshot of Datadog's collaboration features, where users can discuss issues in-context with production data, annotate changes and notify their teams, see who responded to that alert before, and discover what was done to fix it.Screenshot of where Datadog unifies traces, metrics, and logs—the three pillars of observability.Screenshot of some of Datadog's 400+ built-in integrations.Screenshot of Datadog's Service Map, which decomposes an application into all its component services and draws the observed dependencies between these services in real timeScreenshot of centralized log data, pulled from any source.