Datadog vs Prometheus
Thinking of swapping Datadog for the open-source Prometheus? Here’s the honest trade-off.
65k Go Apache-2.0 2 days ago
What you give up vs Datadog
- No built-in dashboards UI; you must pair it with Grafana
- Long-term storage and horizontal scale need add-ons (Thanos, Cortex, Mimir)
- No logs, traces, or APM out of the box (metrics only)
- Steeper operational learning curve than turnkey Datadog
What you gain
- • Full data ownership — self-host Prometheus on your own infrastructure.
- • No per-seat SaaS bill (Datadog: host- and usage-based bills that spike).
- • Open-source code you can audit and extend (Apache-2.0).