Datadog Logs vs Grafana Loki
No clear leader: Grafana Loki (67.2) and Datadog Logs (63.7) are within the 5-point margin; treat as a tie. The attribute-by-attribute breakdown below, with a source and date on every value, is the honest way to compare them.
Capabilities
Feature-by-feature on the axes that matter for log management software. “-” means undocumented, not absent.
What each one is
The product in its own terms, so the numbers below have context.
Datadog Logs
A centralized logging platform that aggregates logs from infrastructure and applications, enabling teams to search, correlate, and analyze log data to quickly diagnose issues, optimize performance, and identify security threats.
Grafana Loki
An open-source logging system that stores logs as labeled streams rather than indexing full log text, reducing storage overhead and enabling fast queries. It integrates with Prometheus and Grafana to provide unified observability across logs and metrics.
Pricing
List pricing as published by each vendor, with the date we read it. Always verify at the source before you buy.
Datadog Logs
Pricing not documented yet.
Grafana Loki
Free tier available. Pro from $19/month + metered usage with volume discounts. Enterprise from $25,000/year.
- FreeFree
- All Grafana Cloud services with limited usage
- Community support
- 14 days retention for metrics, logs, traces, profiles, & k6 performance tests
- ProFrom $19/month + usage with volume discounts
- Pay as you go above the Free tier
- 8X5 email support
- 13 months retention for metrics
- 30 days retention for logs, traces, profiles, & k6 performance tests
- Automatic volume discounts
- EnterpriseContact sales
- Premium support
- Custom retention
- Deployment flexibility (Public Cloud, Federal Cloud, Bring Your Own Cloud)
- Scalable pricing based on annual commit and volume discounts
Platform & deployment
Where each product runs and how it can be hosted. A dash means undocumented, not unsupported.
Integrations
What each product connects to. Counts come from the vendor's own integration directory where one exists.
Datadog Logs
- NVIDIA
- Weaviate
- OpenAI
- Anthropic
- Google Cloud
- AWS
- Azure
Grafana Loki
- Prometheus
- Grafana
- Kubernetes
- Docker
- Prometheus Alertmanager
- Alloy
- Promtail
Datadog Logs or Grafana Loki: which one depends on you
A composite score cannot know your constraints. Describe them and both get re-weighted against what you actually need, with the evidence behind every position.
Free to run, no account needed to start. How the evaluation works
Comparison generated from independently-sourced facts. Every value links to its source and retrieval date. See the method.