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 pros
DataDog is a cloud-based monitoring and analytics platform that helps organizations understand and optimize their technology stack.
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
Uptrace 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.
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
- Public playground to play with the product
- Simple and clean UI (in comparison to others)
- Overview dashboards
- Flexible query builder
- Pre-built metrics dashboards
- Open Source version
Cons
- Low number of pre-built metrics dashboards
- Dashboards only support basic chart types
- No support for profiling or real user monitoring
Instana
Instana 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.
Features
- Distributed tracing
- Infrastructure monitoring
- Log management
Montly pricing
- Starts from $750
- $75 per host (minimum order quantity of 10 hosts)
Pros
- Public playground to play with the product
- Simple and clean UI (in comparison to others)
- Overview dashboards
- Flexible query builder
- Infrastructure monitoring
Cons
- No custom metrics dashboards
- No support for profiling or real user monitoring
LightStep
LightStep 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.
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 playground 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 One 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 tracing.
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.
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
Honeycomb 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.
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
- Public playground with some hints
- Flexible query builder
- Focuses on working with custom datasets
- BubbleUp can help find the root cause of latency regressions
Cons
- Minimalistic "build it yourself" UI
- Requires writing queries to get any results
Sematext
Sematext 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.
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
- Public playground
- Powerful dashboards with Grafana-like UI
- Elasticsearch API and Kibana integration
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.