DataDog Competitors and Alternatives: Pros & Cons

Considering alternatives to Datadog? DataDog has a high learning curve and can be quite expensive if you need to monitor a lot of hosts and microservices.

Here are top DataDog competitors that can offer similar functionality with a simpler user interface and smaller costs. But first, let’s dig deep into DataDog to know its competitors.

What is DataDog?

DataDogDataDog Competitors and Alternatives - 图1open in new window is a monitoring solution that you can use to monitor your cloud infrastructure, applications, containers, network, logs, and even AWS lambdas.

DataDog allows you to monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize cloud-based applications all the way down to a single line of code or individual user requests.

DataDog

Features

  • Distributed tracing
  • Metrics
  • Infrastructure monitoring
  • Log management
  • Continuous Profiling
  • Real users monitoring
  • Alerting with machine learning capabilities
  • And more

Pricing

  • Complicated. Depending on a feature, you may pay per host, per service, or a fixed price.

Pros

  • Full observability solution
  • Tons of features you never heard of
  • Large number of integrations
  • Rich and flexible metrics dashboards

Cons

  • No public playground
  • Overwhelming for newcomers with a complicated UI that has over 100 pages
  • Some features seem to overlap or duplicate each other
  • Complicated billing sometimes results in nasty surprises

DataDog competitors

Uptrace

UptraceDataDog Competitors and Alternatives - 图3open in new window is an open source DataDog alternative that helps developers pinpoint failures and find performance bottlenecks. Uptrace can process billions of spans on a single server and allows to monitor your software at 10x lower cost.

Uptrace DataDog competitor

Features

  • Distributed tracing
  • Metrics
  • Infrastructure monitoring
  • Log management
  • Alerting with anomaly detection

Pricing

  • Starts from $30 for 200 gigabytes, then $0.13 per gigabyte
  • Each span is around 500 bytes
  • Unlimited users, services, and hosts

Pros

Cons

  • Low number of pre-built metrics dashboards
  • Dashboards only support basic chart types
  • No support for profiling or real user monitoring

Instana

InstanaDataDog Competitors and Alternatives - 图7open in new window provides Enterprise Observability and APM for Cloud-Native Applications. Instana APM enables software teams to monitor application performance and availability.

Instana DataDog competitor

Features

  • Distributed tracing
  • Infrastructure monitoring
  • Log management

Montly pricing

  • Starts from $750
  • $75 per host (minimum order quantity of 10 hosts)

Pros

Cons

  • No custom metrics dashboards
  • No support for profiling or real user monitoring

LightStep

LightStepDataDog Competitors and Alternatives - 图10open in new window is the cloud-native reliability platform.

LightStep DataDog altertnative

Features

  • Distributed tracing
  • Metrics
  • Infrastructure monitoring
  • Log management
  • Alerts

Monthly pricing

  • $100 per service
  • Each service gets 1TB and 10k timeseries
  • Each span is around 500 bytes

Pros

  • Public playgroundDataDog Competitors and Alternatives - 图12open in new window with really helpful instructions and hints
  • Latency can be compared to 1 hour / day / week prior using a histogram
  • Correlations can help find the root cause of latency regressions
  • Stream-based alerts
  • OpenTelemetry contributor

Cons

  • Limited query builder capabilities
  • Playground API is often slow and unresponsive even though the number of spans in the public dataset is low
  • No profiling and real user monitoring

NewRelic

New Relic OneDataDog Competitors and Alternatives - 图13open in new window is the leading observability platform where Dev and Ops teams come together to solve problems with data.

NewRelic DataDog alternative

Features

  • Distributed tracing
  • Log management
  • Metrics
  • Infrastructure monitoring
  • Real users monitoring
  • Alerting with anomaly detection

Monthly pricing

  • $0.25 per GB
  • $99 per full platform user
  • $49 per core User

Pros

  • Large number of features and integrations
  • Support for multiple datasets

Cons

  • No public playground
  • Complicated UI
  • Lack of a single pricing page for all features. Tends to be more expensive than DataDog.

Honeycomb

HoneycombDataDog Competitors and Alternatives - 图15open in new window is a fast analysis tool that reveals the truth about how users experience your code in complex and unpredictable environments.

Honeycomb DataDog competitor

Features

  • Distributed tracing
  • Log management
  • Metrics
  • Infrastructure monitoring
  • Integrated alerting

Monthly pricing

  • $100 for up to 100 million events
  • $400 for up to 450 million events
  • $1200 for up to 1500 million events

Pros

Cons

  • Minimalistic “build it yourself” UI
  • Requires writing queries to get any results

Sematext

SematextDataDog Competitors and Alternatives - 图18open in new window is a full-stack cloud monitoring solution that is easy to set up and that gives you in-depth visibility into your IT infrastructure.

Sematext DataDog alternative

Features

  • Log management
  • Metrics
  • Infrastructure monitoring
  • Uptime checks (Synthetics)
  • Alerts

Monthly pricing

  • Logs start with $50/month. $1.56/GB if you ingest 1GB/day, less if you ingest more.
  • Monitoring is $5/month for each agent
  • Unlimited users

Pros

Cons

  • No support for distributed tracing
  • Logs are rather expensive
  • Logs have minimalistic filtering capabilities

DataDog open source alternatives

Some of the DataDog features are provided by Open source distributed tracing tools, for example, SkyWalking or SigNoz.