Datadog vs Zabbix in 2025 - Features, Pricing, On-prem vs SaaS, and More

TL;DR:

When to Choose Each

• Choose Datadog if: You need a managed (SaaS) platform for full-stack observability (metrics, traces, logs). Your team values speed, minimal setup, and a polished UI, and you have the budget for a per-use subscription.
• Choose Zabbix if: Your primary need is on-premise infrastructure and network monitoring. You prioritize zero licensing cost and total data control, and your team has the expertise to install, manage, and scale a self-hosted solution.
• Consider SigNoz if: You want the all-in-one (metrics, traces, logs) experience of Datadog but with the open-source, self-hosted flexibility. You're looking for a cost-effective, OpenTelemetry-native alternative without Datadog's high cost or Zabbix's lack of native APM.

Teams looking for a monitoring solution face a key choice: a managed, all-in-one SaaS platform or a powerful, self-hosted open-source tool. Datadog and Zabbix are prime examples of these two distinct models. Datadog is a cloud-native observability platform, while Zabbix is a comprehensive, open-source solution you run yourself, known for its deep capabilities in network and infrastructure monitoring.

In this article, we will help you decide which one fits your specific stack, team, and budget by breaking down their architecture, core features, pricing, deployment models, and ideal use cases.

Datadog vs Zabbix: At a Glance

Let’s go through these aspects in detail in the following sections.

Overview and History

Datadog

Datadog was founded in 2010 as a cloud-based infrastructure monitoring service, designed to bridge the gap between developer and operations teams. Since then, it has expanded through acquisitions and development into a broad, full-stack observability platform. As a public company, it has become a leader in the monitoring industry, especially for organizations adopting cloud-native technologies. Its SaaS-first model emphasizes ease of use and integration with modern tech stacks.

Zabbix

Zabbix began in the early 2000s, with its first stable release in 2004. It has matured over two decades into an enterprise-grade, open-source monitoring solution. Zabbix LLC, the company behind the tool, was established in 2005 in Latvia. As free open-source software (AGPL license), it has a large global community and is designed to track IT infrastructure, including networks, servers, and cloud services. The company offers tiered professional support for organizations that require guaranteed assistance.

Core Features and Capabilities

While both are comprehensive monitoring tools, their scope and focus differ significantly.

Monitoring Capabilities and Data Collection

Datadog offers end-to-end monitoring. It collects metrics from servers, cloud instances, and containers, but its platform also includes:

• Application Performance Monitoring (APM): Provides distributed tracing to analyze application code performance.
• Log Management: Aggregates and analyzes logs from all your services.
• Full-Stack Correlation: Connects metrics, traces, and logs, allowing you to move from a high-level infrastructure metric to a specific trace or log line causing an issue.

Data collection uses a lightweight agent and over 1,000 official integrations for technologies like AWS, Kubernetes, and Slack. It also features Watchdog, a machine-learning engine that automatically detects anomalies without manual threshold setting.

Zabbix focuses on infrastructure and network monitoring. It tracks metrics like CPU load, memory usage, disk space, and network throughput. Its data collection is highly flexible:

• Zabbix Agent: An agent installed on hosts to collect metrics.
• Agentless Monitoring: Zabbix excels at agentless collection via SNMP (for network devices like routers and switches), IPMI (for hardware sensors), and JMX (for Java applications).
• Custom Scripts: Users can define custom metrics (called "items") and triggers for alerting.

Zabbix provides over 300 official templates for common hardware and software. However, it does not natively provide distributed tracing/APM or a dedicated log analytics datastore (it supports log file monitoring via agent items). These functions require integrating external tools.

Visualization and Dashboards

Datadog provides a clean, modern, and intuitive web interface. When you enable an integration, you often get a pre-built, high-quality dashboard automatically. Users can create custom dashboards with a drag-and-drop editor, filtering data in real-time using tags.

Zabbix offers a highly customizable, widget-based dashboard system. While powerful, it has a steeper learning curve. The UI has improved significantly in recent versions but is generally considered less polished. Administrators can design complex views, including network topology maps and slide shows for Network Operations Center (NOC) displays, but this requires more manual effort.

Alerting and Notifications

Datadog's alerting is both threshold-based and ML-driven. The Watchdog feature can surface "unknown unknowns" that a static threshold would miss. Notifications are easily configured for a wide variety of channels, including Slack, PagerDuty, and email, with support for alert grouping to reduce noise.

Zabbix's alerting is based on its powerful "trigger" system. Users define granular, threshold-based rules for any metric. Its key strength is its built-in escalation and remediation capability. You can configure complex workflows, such as notifying a junior admin, then a senior admin, and if the issue persists, automatically running a script to restart a service.

Deployment Model: Cloud vs. On-Premise

This is one of the most significant differences between the two platforms.

Datadog: Pure SaaS

Datadog is delivered as a cloud-based SaaS service. There is no on-premise version.

• Setup: You create an account, install agents, and data starts flowing. There is no server installation or maintenance required from you.
• Scalability: Datadog's backend scales seamlessly as your usage grows.
• Requirement: This model requires a constant internet connection to send your monitoring data to Datadog's cloud. This may be a non-starter for organizations with air-gapped networks or strict data sovereignty rules.

Zabbix: Self-Hosted

Zabbix is software you deploy and run yourself. This gives you complete control.

• Setup: You must install and configure the Zabbix server, a database (like MySQL or PostgreSQL), and the web front-end. This can be on an on-premise server, in a private cloud, or on a public cloud VM (like an AWS EC2 instance). Zabbix provides virtual appliances and Docker containers to simplify this process.
• Control: You have 100% control over your data, making it ideal for air-gapped or high-security environments.
• Maintenance: You are responsible for all maintenance, including OS patching, database management, scaling, and Zabbix software upgrades.
• Scalability: Zabbix can scale to monitor thousands of devices, but it requires careful architecture. This is often done using Zabbix Proxies, which collect data from remote locations and send it to the central server, reducing load. Zabbix 6.0 and newer versions also include a native high-availability (HA) option.

Note: Zabbix also offers Zabbix Cloud, a fully managed SaaS option, for teams that prefer not to operate the Zabbix server themselves. However, some item types (e.g., SNMP traps) aren’t supported; upgrades happen during a weekly maintenance window; current docs say you can’t import an existing instance into Cloud(as of October 2025).

Pricing Models and Cost Considerations

The cost structure for these tools is fundamentally different.

Zabbix Pricing

The Zabbix software is completely free and open-source. There are no license fees, regardless of the number of hosts, users, or metrics.

The cost of Zabbix is its Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), which includes:

• Infrastructure: The cost of the servers (on-prem hardware or cloud VMs) and storage for your Zabbix server and database.
• Personnel: The time and salary of the engineers required to install, configure, maintain, and upgrade the system.
• Support (Optional): You can purchase official enterprise support subscriptions from Zabbix LLC in tiered packages for guaranteed assistance.

Datadog Pricing

Datadog is a commercial SaaS product with a pay-as-you-go subscription model. Costs are broken down by product and usage, and it can become complex.

• Infrastructure: Infrastructure: Priced per host, per month.
• APM: Priced per host or per GB of traced data.
• Log Management: Priced per GB of data ingested and retained.

This model is flexible, but costs can increase sharply at scale. Every additional host, container, or GB of logs adds to the monthly bill, requiring active cost management. Datadog offers a 14-day free trial of all features.

Ease of Use and Learning Curve

Datadog

Datadog generally wins on ease of initial setup. Because it is SaaS, you can be up and running in minutes. The UI is modern and intuitive, and pre-built dashboards provide immediate value. While the basic functionality is easy to grasp, mastering the full, complex product suite (especially cost management and advanced querying) has its own learning curve.

Zabbix

Zabbix has a steeper learning curve. The initial setup is more involved, as it requires installing the server and database. Users must learn Zabbix-specific concepts like Hosts, Items, Triggers, and Templates. While recent versions have improved the UI, it can feel overwhelming to new users. Zabbix shines in the hands of a skilled team willing to invest time in learning and customizing it.

Integrations and Ecosystem

Datadog

A key strength for Datadog is its vast ecosystem of 1,000+ plug-and-play integrations (as of October 2025). If you use a common cloud service, database, or developer tool, Datadog almost certainly has a one-click integration for it, complete with a default dashboard.

Zabbix

Zabbix comes with 300+ official templates for common systems. Its true power, however, is in its extensibility. The Zabbix community is very active in sharing custom templates and scripts. You can use UserParameters or external scripts to monitor virtually anything that can be accessed via a command or network protocol.

This is a "plug-and-play" (Datadog) versus "script-and-play" (Zabbix) model. Datadog is faster for common technologies; Zabbix is more flexible for custom or legacy hardware.

Security and Compliance

Datadog

As a managed service, Datadog lists certifications including SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001, and offers HIPAA-eligible options.. All communication is encrypted by default. Datadog also sells additional security products, like Security Monitoring (SIEM) and Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM), allowing teams to unify operations and security on one platform.

Zabbix

With Zabbix, security and compliance are your responsibility. Because it is self-hosted, you control the environment. The software provides the necessary features, such as RBAC, LDAP/Active Directory authentication, and TLS encryption for all components. However, you must implement and configure them correctly to meet standards like HIPAA or GDPR. Zabbix does not provide built-in SIEM or security analytics features.

Decision Framework: When to Choose Which?

When to Choose Datadog

• You run a cloud-native or microservices-based stack (Kubernetes, AWS, GCP, serverless).
• You need full-stack observability (metrics, traces, and logs) correlated in one platform.
• You prefer a managed SaaS solution to minimize operational overhead and get started quickly.
• You have a budget for a per-use subscription and value speed-to-market over total control.
• Your infrastructure is highly dynamic and auto-scales frequently.

When to Choose Zabbix

• You are budget-conscious and want to avoid recurring software license fees.
• Your primary need is monitoring on-premise infrastructure, network devices (using SNMP), and physical servers.
• You have strict data sovereignty or security requirements that mandate a self-hosted or air-gapped solution.
• You have a skilled IT/Ops team with the time to manage, tune, and customize a powerful monitoring tool.
• You value deep customization and the ability to run automated remediation scripts.

SigNoz: Datadog's All-in-One Features, Zabbix's Open-Source Flexibility

Zabbix is free and open-source but lacks native APM and log analytics. Datadog offers a full-stack platform but is proprietary and can be very expensive.

If you are looking for a solution that combines the best of both worlds, you should consider SigNoz. SigNoz is an all-in-one observability platform that unifies metrics, traces, and logs in a single application.

It is built on OpenTelemetry, making it vendor-neutral and future-proof. SigNoz provides a full-stack observability experience similar to Datadog but with the flexibility and control of an open-source, self-hostable solution. For teams that want to avoid managing the backend, SigNoz also offers a cloud solution that is often more cost-effective than Datadog.

Get Started with SigNoz

You can choose between various deployment options in SigNoz. The easiest way to get started with SigNoz is SigNoz cloud. We offer a 30-day free trial account with access to all features.

Those who have data privacy concerns and can't send their data outside their infrastructure can sign up for either enterprise self-hosted or BYOC offering.

Those who have the expertise to manage SigNoz themselves or just want to start with a free self-hosted option can use our community edition.

Hope we answered all your questions regarding Datadog vs Zabbix. If you have more questions, feel free to use the SigNoz AI chatbot, or join our slack community.

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