Datadog vs Grafana
Datadog and Grafana are both monitoring and observability software. Datadog is a commercial product from Datadog, Inc. Grafana is open source under AGPL-3.0, with 78k GitHub stars.
Which to pick
- Pick Datadog when
- An engineering organisation wants every observability signal in one well-integrated product and has the budget.
- Pick Grafana when
- You need shared dashboards and alerts across several data sources, self-hosted or on Grafana Cloud.
Side by side
Cloud monitoring and observability for infrastructure metrics, APM traces, logs, real user monitoring, security and more, in one SaaS.
A dashboard and alerting platform that visualises metrics, logs and traces from Prometheus, Loki, Elasticsearch, SQL databases and many other sources.
Bills grow quickly and unpredictably with hosts, logs and custom metrics.
AGPL licensed, and some features live only in Grafana Enterprise or Cloud.
Production-ready (both)
Cloud service
Self-hosted server and cloud service
Go
Go, TypeScript and React
Closed source, sold by Datadog, Inc.
Open source, AGPL-3.0 (network copyleft)
Closed source: you use it under the maker's terms and cannot change or resell the code.
Use inside your business is unrestricted. If you change it and let customers use it over the internet, you must publish your changes.
2.4k Wikipedia readers a month on phones
78k GitHub stars
Not known
Established: started 13 years ago, latest release v13.3.0.
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Both sides were judged on 2026-11-03 from makers' descriptions, Wikipedia, READMEs and GitHub data. License, age and popularity lines are worked out directly.