Splunk vs Datadog: Which SIEM Is Best? [2025 Comparison]

Splunk vs Datadog, that’s today’s dilemma.

These are two very popular security tools that defenders users daily to combat the latest cyber threats. But which is the right one for you?

This article examines Splunk and Datadog in-depth, exploring each solution's core features, performance, scalability, and ease of use. However, the tool is just one piece of the puzzle.

You’ll also learn what integrations each supports, what help is available with each tool, and common use cases. Finally, we’ll discuss the costs associated with each one.

Let’s jump in and begin assessing Splunk vs Datadog difference and comparison.

What Are Splunk and Datadog?

Splunk and Datadog are two of the best Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solutions available today.

SIEM solutions allow you to gather security data from various systems across your organization. You can gather network, system, and firewall logs in a single place and write security rules to trigger alerts whenever suspicious activity is detected.

Here’s a quick rundown of each.

What Is Splunk?

Splunk has been a leading SIEM solution since the early 2010s, thanks to its robust feature set and powerful data indexing and searching capabilities.

It’s widely used across various industries to help organizations gain valuable insights from their data, not just for cyber security but also for IT operations, DevOps, and business intelligence.

Throughout the 2010s, Splunk has innovated its platform by acquiring smaller cyber security companies and integrating their products into Splunk. This led to Splunk's IT Service Intelligence (ITSI), User Behavior Analytics (UBA) detection engine, and a transition to a cloud-based solution.

Since 2020, Splunk has expanded into new markets and industries, including DevOps, IoT, and business analytics.

Splunk is a goliath in the SIEM space and is a common choice for large enterprises that require a robust, mature, and fully supported SIEM solution.

What Is Datadog?

Datadog is the new kid on the block in the SIEM space. It’s a fully cloud-based monitoring and analytics platform for your infrastructure, applications, logs, and other observability tools in modern cloud environments.

Despite being founded in 2010, Datadog’s rapid growth came after its Initial Public Offering (IPO) in 2019 by filling the market need for monitoring emerging technologies like Kubernetes, serverless computing, and microservices architectures.

This led to Datadog’s robust ecosystem of integrations with third-party tools and technologies, making it an easy tool to integrate with your existing workflows and environments.

Datadog is often the top choice if you run your application-focused business operations through the cloud, which requires advanced monitoring and analytics to troubleshoot issues and optimize resources.

Core Features and Capabilities of Splunk and Datadog

Now that you have a general understanding of each product and what target market they focus on, let’s explore their core features to see how they compare.

Splunk Features and Capabilities

Splunk is a powerful SIEM solution that has built a robust feature set over its tenure as a market-leading product.

Here are some of the top features that make it stand out from the competition:

Datadog Features and Capabilities

Despite having fewer features than Splunk, Datadog's features align closely with modern businesses' requirements. They focus more on providing visibility into the entire stack rather than just common logs.

Datadog’s key features include:

Splunk vs Datadog: Ease of Use and User Interface

It’s great knowing what these SIEM solutions can do, but what do they look like? Let’s explore each solution’s user interface (UI) and how easy it is to navigate.

Splunk Ease of Use and User Interface

Splunk is pretty basic out-of-the-box. It has an Admin area, a Security Analytics section, and a home Dashboard. Splunk’s power comes in once you’ve done some basic configuration, created a few dashboards, and set up your alerts and notifications.

You can tailor Splunk’s interface to whatever your organization needs. For example, if you need to monitor your performance, you can create a dashboard focusing on performance metrics. Alternatively, you can make a separate dashboard with security events if you just want to monitor security alerts.

Splunk Dashboard

This customization makes Splunk ideal for many customers with very different use cases. In addition, the tool’s support for complex visualizations makes it easy to quickly see what's going on with whatever data source you use. It just requires time upfront to get everything the way you want it to look.

Datadog Ease of Use and User Interface

Like Splunk, Datadog prioritizes ease of use through intuitive dashboards that users create to access and analyze their data quickly. However, unlike Splunk, Datadog has a wider range of pre-built dashboards that align with your use case, such as infrastructure monitoring, incident management, or application performance monitoring.  

Datadog Dashboard

You can also create custom dashboards using their intuitive drag-and-drop builder and various widgets, charts, graphs, and other visualizations.

Again, this is similar to Splunk but with an easier learning curve due to the many options and intuitive dashboard-building tools.

It’s fairly even for ease of use, but Datadog has a slight edge, given how easy it is to build dashboards using their platform.

Splunk vs Datadog: Integration and Extensibility

In today’s cyber security world, organizations use various tools and technologies to protect themselves from cyber attacks.

As such, it’s important that the SIEM solution you use can integrate with a range of third-party apps and is extensible. Let’s compare Splunk and Datadog.

Splunk Integration and Extensibility

Splunk can integrate with various third-party applications and tools through its community support and Splunkbase, its marketplace for apps and add-ons.

These include collaboration platforms like Slack, ticket systems like Jira, and other security tools like Cloudflare, PhishTank, and VirusTotal.

The Splunkbase is also where you’ll find official add-ons created by Splunk to tailor your Splunk deployment to your organization’s needs. Add-ons are available for popular operating systems (Microsoft Windows and Linux), cloud platforms (AWS and GCP), and machine learning.

If you have a specific problem that a third-party app or add-on cannot resolve, you can even build your custom apps using Splunk’s extensive developer resource library.

Datadog Integration and Extensibility

Datadog supports even more third-party apps than Splunk, with 700+ turn-key integrations. Many are developer-focused with cloud services, container orchestration, configuration management, CI/CD pipelines, and monitoring and logging tools.

Datadog’s support for OpenTelemetry makes this excellent integration support possible. It allows standardized instrumentation and data collection across various platforms and services, making integrating products easy.

Datadog also includes extensive API support, allowing you to programmatically interact with any tool or platform with an API and even build your agent-based custom checks to collect and monitor custom metrics and events from your application or services.

Datadog wins in this category despite Splunk's great integrations with enterprise tools. Datadog is a platform built for DevOps and developers, so they prioritize making the platform as extensible as possible so you can use everything you need to secure your code, deployments, and infrastructure.

Splunk vs Datadog: Performance and Scalability

Features, ease of use, and integrations are great, but can these SIEM solutions scale to support enterprise-level environments and remain performant? Let’s investigate.

Splunk Performance and Scalability

A reason so many large enterprises use Splunk is its ability to scale and adapt to any organization's evolving data and security needs. The architecture and underlying indexing technology allow Splunk to consume terabytes of data daily.

Here is a typical Splunk architecture diagram and how each key component interacts:

This capability is possible whether deploying on-premise with Splunk Enterprise or in the cloud with the Splunk Cloud Platform.

Datadog Performance and Scalability

While Splunk can be installed in the cloud or on-premise, Datadog is specifically designed for the cloud.

This allows it to incorporate many cloud-based features, such as auto-scaling (horizontal and vertical), high availability, and service discovery, to scale and remain performant automatically.

This is ideal if you want a hands-off solution that can grow with your organization. However, it gives you less control over your infrastructure. While it can be great if you have a small team and don’t want an infrastructure management headache, compliance could be challenging when you need your data in a specific country.

Overall, both Splunk and Datadog have excellent scalability and performance. If your IT infrastructure is hosted on-premise, Splunk Enterprise will give you more control over how you choose to scale. If you use many cloud-based resources, then Splunk Cloud Platform or Datadog are great choices.

Splunk vs Datadog: Use Cases

So, how can you use Splunk and Datadog in your daily work?

Splunk Use Cases

Here are several examples of how you could use Splunk for your business:

• Cyber security: Splunk shines as an SIEM tool. It’s capable of real-time security monitoring, threat detection, incident and compliance management, threat hunting, and even automated response with Splunk SOAR.
• Managing IT operations: Splunk gives IT teams complete visibility of their IT estate and observability tools to monitor the state of key components, especially from traditional log sources.
• Application Performance Monitoring (APM): A business’s applications are often the first to be targeted by hackers. Splunk allows you to monitor them, detect anomalies, and mitigate potential security risks so the bad guys cannot gain a foothold.
• Business analytics and intelligence: Splunk can go beyond collecting, indexing, and searching through logs. You can also use it to extract valuable business insights from your organization’s data and make informed decisions that propel your business forward.

Datadog Use Cases

Datadog has a wider range of use cases than Splunk. Here are some of them:

• Infrastructure monitoring: Datadog offers full-stack observability across servers, cloud infrastructure, and containers. This provides detailed insights into your entire environment's performance, usage, and health in one platform.
• IoT Monitoring: Datadog’s support for OpenTelemetry means it can collect and monitor data from a wider range of sources, including IoT devices. This allows you to analyze data, detect issues, and measure the operational efficiency of the IoT devices deployed in your environment.
• Log management: You can centralize all your logs from on-premise servers to remote workstations to cloud services in a single platform for easier analysis and troubleshooting. This lets you analyze your logs in real time, correlate events across log sources, and create custom metrics to measure application performance and user activity.
• DevOps and DevSecOps: Datadog allows you to monitor your entire CI/CD pipeline to ensure a secure and efficient build, test, and deployment process every time. This is possible through its integrations with DevSecOps tooling, automated monitoring options, and deployment tracking features.

With its advanced integrations and logging support, Datadog is more geared towards infrastructure and cloud monitoring, making it ideal for organizations that run complex workloads, build applications, or heavily rely on cloud services.

On the other hand, Splunk focuses more on data analysis and traditional cyber security use cases with its rich feature set of observability tools geared towards enterprises.

Splunk vs Datadog: Community and Support

Community and support can make or break a security product, especially advanced ones like SIEM solutions. Here’s what Splunk and Datadog make available to their users to ensure they have the best experience using their products.

In the support category, Splunk's longevity has led to an overwhelming number of learning resources, community answers, and additional support that make it incredibly easy to use despite its initial complexity. Datadog does offer good support but fewer options.

Splunk vs Datadog: Pricing and Licensing

The final factor to consider is the cost.

Splunk Pricing

Splunk offers free trials of its Splunk Cloud Platform and Splunk Enterprise products, which allow users to try out each product’s full feature set before making a purchasing decision.

Then, they have paid plans that offer flexible pricing, providing more control over how you’re billed for your Splunk usage.

The flexible pricing options include:

• Workload pricing: This plan aligns costs with the types of workloads running on the Splunk Platform. It’s a good option if you want to bring more data into Splunk that you will search through less frequently.
• Entity pricing: This plan is the most predictable and controllable. You just pay for how many hosts are using Splunk.
• Ingest pricing: You pay based on the amount of data you ingest into the Splunk platform. Again, this offers a simple and predictable approach.
• Activity-based pricing: Costs are connected to the activities monitored by Splunk, such as metric time series (MTS), traces analyzed per minute, sessions, or uptime requests.

Each plan is designed to help customers get more value from their data. However, it can be confusing to determine which plan is right for you.

This brochure provides more details about Splunk’s flexible pricing structure. You can typically expect to pay $150 per ingested 1GB per month. For an exact quote, you must contact the Splunk team directly.

Datadog Pricing

Datadog’s pricing structure is a bit easier to follow. You can start with their free version to get a feel of what the product offers, but this has support, integrations, and metric retention limitations.

Then, you can move up to their paid plans, which start at $5 per million events analyzed per month.

However, if you want to monitor other things, like applications, containers, databases, and logs, you must pay more based on GB, hosts, or events. This makes making a direct comparison difficult, as the overall costs depend heavily on your organization's use case.

In terms of pricing, Datadog is a cheaper option, especially for small businesses that use it for a specific use case. As your number of hosts increases or you want to ingest more logs, Splunk’s flexible enterprise pricing will likely reduce your overall costs.

Splunk vs Datadog: Overall Comparison

Here are the main similarities and differences between Splunk and Datadog.

Conclusion

Splunk and Datadog are two very popular SIEM solutions many organizations use worldwide. Choosing which is right for you can be a difficult decision. This article highlighted the main differences between each solution.

Splunk is a comprehensive, enterprise-ready SIEM solution that efficiently collects, indexes, and analyzes big data.

It’s been a goliath in the security industry for a long time and offers tons of support to get you up and running. It works well with enterprise applications and is well-suited for cyber security, IT operations, and business intelligence.

Datadog is a newer SIEM solution that provides full-stack observability with its feature-rich infrastructure and IoT monitoring tools. It’s completely hosted in the cloud and can be scaled to any size.

It has great documentation and is designed for log management, DevOps, and DevSecOps, and is ideal for companies that build and maintain software in the cloud.

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