Top 6 DataDog Competitors and Alternatives [2023 comparison]

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.

DataDog competitors

DataDog pros

DataDogopen in new window is a cloud-based monitoring and analytics platform that helps organizations understand and optimize their technology stack.

DataDog

DataDog provides real-time visibility into the health and performance of IT systems, allowing organizations to detect and resolve performance issues before they impact business operations.

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.

DD easily integrates with a wide variety of technologies, such as cloud services, databases, servers, containers, and applications. It provides a centralized platform for collecting, storing, and analyzing performance data.

DataDog cons

Like any technology, DataDog has both advantages and disadvantages.

Cost. While DataDog offers a wide range of features, its pricing can be a bit steep for smaller organizations.

Complex setup. Getting the most out of DataDog requires a certain level of technical expertise, and the setup process can be complex and time-consuming.

Learning curve. There is a steep learning curve associated with using DataDog, especially for users who are new to monitoring and analytics.

DataDog competitors

Uptrace

Uptraceopen 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 allows you to track, visualize, and pinpoint failures in the distributed microservices. You can visualize and correlate the events flowing through complex distributed systems.

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

Instanaopen in new window is a cloud-based observability and application performance management (APM) platform. It provides real-time visibility into the performance and behavior of applications, services, and infrastructure, and helps organizations quickly identify and resolve issues.

Instana allows to identify the root cause and resolve system failures with ease by tracking every operation in complex distributed microservices. Instana uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to automatically detect and analyze performance anomalies, and provides insights into application performance, service behavior, and infrastructure health.

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

LightStepopen in new window is the cloud-native reliability platform. It provides full-context root cause analysis with traces, logs, and metrics.

Lightstep provides real-time dashboards with a visual representation of the collected data. Whenever there is an anonamly, you get immediately alerted via your preferred notification channels.

Lightstep uses distributed tracing to track requests and transactions as they flow through microservices and other components, and provides a visual representation of how these components interact.

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 playgroundopen 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 Oneopen in new window is the leading observability platform where Dev and Ops teams come together to solve problems with data. It provides a thorough microservices monitoring system that is based on distributed tracingopen in new window.

NewRelic provides real-time insights into the performance of applications, infrastructure, and browser experiences, and enables organizations to quickly identify and resolve issues.

New Relic is designed to help organizations deliver better digital experiences to their customers, and to improve the efficiency and reliability of their technology infrastructure.

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

Honeycombopen in new window is a fast analysis tool that reveals the truth about how users experience your code in complex and unpredictable environments. It provides complete visibility into distributed microservices and multi-cloud environment.

Honeycomb allows organizations to collect, store, and analyze performance data from their applications and infrastructure, and to quickly identify and resolve issues.

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

Sematextopen 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. It provides fully managed cloud-native experience with on-demand scalability.

Sematext provides real-time insights into the behavior and performance of complex, distributed applications.

Sematext offers integrations with various development and operations tools, such as GitHub, PagerDuty, and Slack, to streamline collaboration and improve workflows.

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

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

You can also check the Detailed DataDog vs Prometheus comparison if you are considering using Prometheus.

Last Updated:
Uptrace is an open-source APM and DataDog alternative that supports OpenTelemetry traces, metrics, and logs. You can use it to monitor apps and set up alerts to receive notifications via email, Slack, Telegram, and more. View on GitHub →Uptrace Demo