Datadog Cloud SIEM vs Substation: Side-by-Side Comparison (2026)

Datadog Cloud SIEM

Security teams already running Datadog for infrastructure and application observability should adopt Cloud SIEM to correlate security events with the underlying systems generating them; this eliminates the blind spot of traditional SIEMs that ingest logs in isolation. The platform covers continuous monitoring and incident response (NIST DE.CM and RS.MA), with multi-cloud log ingestion across AWS, Azure, and GCP built in rather than bolted on. Skip this if your priority is forensic depth or compliance reporting; Cloud SIEM is built for detection speed and operational context, not exhaustive audit trails.

Substation

Security teams building custom detection pipelines on AWS will get immediate value from Substation's event-driven architecture; it routes security data across services and enriches events with APIs without the overhead of commercial SIEM licensing. The free, open-source model (390 GitHub stars) means no vendor lock-in and full control over data formatting and routing logic. Skip this if your team lacks AWS expertise or needs out-of-the-box alerting and dashboards; Substation is a data plumbing tool, not a detection platform.