Datadog Alternatives: Monitoring Tools That Won't Break the Budget (2026)

Datadog’s pricing model has a way of surprising you at billing time. What starts as a reasonably scoped observability setup expands—more hosts, more log ingestion, more custom metrics—and suddenly you’re paying $30,000 a year for a 10-person engineering team. That’s not an exaggeration: it’s a common complaint in Reddit threads, Hacker News discussions, and engineering Slack channels.

This guide is for teams who have outgrown free monitoring tools but aren’t ready for (or can’t justify) Datadog’s enterprise pricing. We’ll look at what Datadog actually costs, what you get for that money, and which alternatives make sense depending on what you actually need.

What Datadog Actually Costs

Datadog is notoriously complex to price because most features are billed separately and usage scales with your infrastructure. Here’s what you’ll realistically pay:

Infrastructure Monitoring

Pro: ~$15/host/month
Enterprise: ~$23/host/month
50 hosts on Pro: $750/month ($9,000/year)

Log Management

Ingestion: $0.10 per GB
Retention at 15 days: $2.50 per million log events
A team generating 100 GB/day of logs: ~$300/month in ingestion alone

Synthetic Monitoring (API tests)

~$5 per 10,000 API test runs
Running 100 endpoints every 5 minutes: ~3 million runs/month = ~$1,500/month

APM (Application Performance Monitoring)

~$31/host/month (Pro) or ~$40/host/month (Enterprise)

For a company with 50 hosts, moderate log volume, synthetic monitoring, and APM, it’s realistic to spend $8,000–$15,000 per month. Datadog’s value is genuine at enterprise scale—it’s a genuinely excellent product. But many teams are paying enterprise prices for use cases that don’t require enterprise tooling.

What Are You Actually Trying to Monitor?

Before picking an alternative, it’s worth separating your monitoring needs into distinct categories:

Need	What it is	Datadog alternative
Uptime monitoring	Is my website/API up?	StatusApp, Better Stack, UptimeRobot
Infrastructure	CPU, memory, disk on servers	Grafana Cloud, Prometheus, Netdata
APM	Application traces, database queries	Sentry, Elastic APM, Honeycomb
Log management	Centralized log search/analysis	Grafana Loki, Logflare, Papertrail
Full observability	All of the above, integrated	Datadog, New Relic, Dynatrace

If you need everything integrated—metrics, traces, logs, and synthetic monitoring in one place—the alternatives are legitimately harder. But most teams conflate their needs. They’re paying for full Datadog observability when they actually need uptime monitoring + logs + maybe basic server metrics.

The Best Datadog Alternatives

1. StatusApp — For Uptime and Synthetic Monitoring

Best for: Teams that need reliable website/API monitoring, status pages, and instant alerting.

If your primary use case is “alert me when my website or API goes down,” you don’t need Datadog. StatusApp runs checks every 30 seconds from 35+ global locations—HTTP, TCP, DNS, SSL, keyword, and more. You get instant alerts via Slack, PagerDuty, email, SMS, and webhook, plus a hosted status page.

Pricing: Free plan available. Paid plans from $15/month.

What you give up vs Datadog: No APM, no infrastructure metrics, no log management. It’s purpose-built for uptime and response time monitoring.

What you gain: A dedicated, opinionated tool that does one thing very well, at a fraction of the cost. Most teams running Datadog synthetic checks alongside infrastructure monitoring would reduce their bill significantly by moving synthetic checks to a dedicated tool.

2. Grafana Cloud — For Infrastructure and Metrics

Best for: Teams that want Prometheus + Grafana without managing the infrastructure themselves.

Grafana is the de facto standard for visualising infrastructure metrics. Grafana Cloud is the managed version—you get Prometheus-compatible metrics storage, Grafana dashboards, Loki for logs, and Tempo for traces, all on a managed platform.

Pricing: Free tier includes 10,000 series of metrics, 50 GB logs, 50 GB traces. After that, pricing scales per usage—significantly cheaper than Datadog for most configurations.

The tradeoff: Grafana Cloud requires more setup than Datadog. You’re configuring agents, deciding what to scrape, and building dashboards. Datadog’s out-of-the-box integrations are more polished. If your team has the engineering time, Grafana is genuinely powerful; if you want quick time-to-value, it’s more effort.

Cost comparison example: 50 hosts with Grafana Cloud typically costs 40–60% less than equivalent Datadog infrastructure monitoring.

3. Better Stack — For Logs and On-Call

Best for: Teams that want Datadog-style log search and on-call management in a simpler product.

Better Stack (formerly Logtail) combines log management, uptime monitoring, and incident management. It’s significantly cheaper than Datadog for teams that primarily need log search and alerting rather than deep APM.

Pricing: From $24/month for logs. Includes uptime monitoring.

What’s different: Better Stack’s log ingestion is based on GB/month rather than per-event, which often makes it cheaper for high-volume, low-value log workloads. The UI is cleaner than Datadog’s. On-call scheduling is built in.

Limitations: No APM or distributed tracing. Less mature than Datadog for complex enterprise use cases.

4. New Relic — For Teams That Need Full Observability

Best for: Teams moving from Datadog who genuinely need APM + infrastructure + logs.

New Relic restructured its pricing in 2021 to be user-based rather than host-based: you pay per GB of data ingested and per monthly active user, rather than per host. For teams with a large number of small instances (microservices, containers), this can be significantly cheaper than Datadog.

Pricing: Free tier includes 100 GB/month of data and 1 full-access user. Paid is $0.25–$0.35/GB ingested + $99/month per full user.

Cost comparison: A team with 5 engineers, 100 GB/month of telemetry data, and full APM would pay roughly $500–800/month on New Relic vs potentially $2,000+/month on Datadog for equivalent coverage.

Gotcha: New Relic’s per-user pricing gets expensive if your entire engineering org needs access. If you have 20 engineers all needing access, that’s $1,980/month in user seats alone.

5. Sentry — For Application Error Tracking

Best for: Development teams that primarily care about application errors and performance.

Sentry is the gold standard for error tracking. It captures exceptions with full stack traces, source maps, user context, and performance data. It’s not an infrastructure monitoring tool—it doesn’t tell you if your server is overloaded—but for software teams who primarily want to track bugs and application-level performance, it’s excellent.

Pricing: Free tier includes 5,000 errors/month. Team plan from $26/month.

Why consider it over Datadog: If your team is primarily using Datadog for error tracking and APM in your application layer (not infrastructure), Sentry is purpose-built, much simpler, and far cheaper.

6. Prometheus + Grafana (Self-Hosted) — For Teams With Engineering Resources

Best for: Teams with DevOps/SRE capacity who want zero vendor lock-in.

Prometheus is the open-source, industry-standard metrics collection and alerting system. Combined with Grafana for dashboards and Alertmanager for notifications, it covers most of what Datadog’s infrastructure monitoring does—at no licensing cost.

Real cost: Not free. You need to run and maintain it. At meaningful scale, the infrastructure costs and engineering time to maintain Prometheus can rival Datadog’s pricing. This stack makes sense for teams with dedicated SRE capacity or those with strong cost reasons to avoid SaaS tools.

Limitations: No out-of-the-box SaaS integrations, no unified log management (Loki is separate), steeper learning curve.

How to Choose

Run through these questions in order:

Do you need APM (distributed traces, database query analysis)?

Yes → New Relic or stay with Datadog (or use Sentry for application errors only)
No → keep reading

Do you primarily need uptime monitoring and alerting?

Yes → StatusApp (dedicated, simpler, far cheaper)

Do you primarily need log management?

Yes → Better Stack or Grafana Loki

Do you need infrastructure metrics (CPU, memory, disk)?

Yes + have engineering resources → Prometheus + Grafana
Yes + want managed → Grafana Cloud or New Relic

Do you need everything in one place?

Yes → New Relic is the best all-in-one Datadog alternative on price

A Realistic Migration Strategy

Most teams don’t need to rip and replace Datadog in one go. A phased approach typically saves the most money:

Immediately: Move uptime/synthetic monitoring to a dedicated tool (StatusApp). This alone can save $1,000–$3,000/month on Datadog synthetic pricing.
Short term: Evaluate whether you actually use Datadog APM regularly. Many teams have APM enabled but rarely use traces for debugging.
Longer term: If you’re committed to moving off Datadog fully, plan for 2–3 months to set up an equivalent stack and migrate dashboards and alerts.

The Bottom Line

Datadog is an excellent product. It’s genuinely best-in-class for large engineering teams that need deep observability across a complex infrastructure. But it’s often overkill for smaller teams, and its pricing model makes it particularly expensive when synthetic monitoring or log ingestion volumes scale up.

The right alternative depends entirely on which slice of Datadog you actually use. For most companies that primarily need “tell me when things are down,” a purpose-built uptime monitoring tool is a far better fit than paying for a full observability platform.