Datadog vs New Relic
Datadog vs New Relic compared on per-host vs per-GB and per-user pricing, free tiers, APM, logs, OpenTelemetry support and where each bill surprises teams.
Quick Answer
Choose Datadog if you want the broadest, most polished observability and security suite and can manage a per-host, per-product bill. Choose New Relic if you want a generous free tier and simpler all-in-one pricing based on data ingested and users, especially with small teams and many hosts.
Reviewed by TechLogHub Engineering Team. Last updated October 15, 2026. Reflects Datadog's current per-host infrastructure, APM and log prices and New Relic's 100 GB free tier, $0.40/GB ingest, user tiers and compute-based pricing option as of 2026.
| Feature | Datadog | New Relic |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing Model | Per host / per volume, per product | Per GB ingested + per user (or compute-based) |
| Free Tier | Infra up to 5 hosts, 1-day retention | 100 GB/month + 1 full user |
| Infrastructure Monitoring | Pro $15/host/mo, Enterprise $23 (annual) | Included (billed by data ingested) |
| APM | $31/host/mo with infra (annual) | Included (billed by data ingested) |
| Logs | $0.10/GB ingest + $1.70/M events indexed | $0.40/GB after 100 GB ($0.60 Data Plus) |
| User Licences | No per-user fees | Basic free, Core $49, Full platform up to $349 |
| Query Language | Faceted search + metric queries | NRQL (SQL-like) |
| OpenTelemetry Support | Supported (OTLP ingest, OTel Collector) | Supported (native OTLP endpoint) |
| Product Breadth | Very broad (observability + security) | Broad (observability-focused) |
| Company Status | Public company (NASDAQ: DDOG) | Private (Francisco Partners and TPG) |
Datadog
A SaaS observability and security platform covering infrastructure, APM, logs, RUM, synthetics, security and more, priced per product, mostly per host or per volume.
Pros
- Broadest product catalog: infra, APM, logs, RUM, synthetics, database monitoring, security, CI visibility, LLM observability
- 800+ integrations and a polished, fast UI that correlates metrics, traces and logs
- Logging without Limits separates cheap ingestion from indexing so you index only what you query
- Strong Kubernetes, container and serverless coverage
- No per-user fees; add as many users as you need
- Free infrastructure tier for up to 5 hosts
Cons
- Per-product, per-host pricing adds up fast and is hard to forecast
- Custom metrics, indexed logs and high-cardinality tags are common sources of bill shock
- Free tier keeps only 1 day of metrics
- On-demand rates are notably higher than annual commitments
- Proprietary agent and features create switching costs
Best For
Engineering organisations that want one best-in-class platform across observability and security and have budget for it.
New Relic
An all-in-one observability platform priced mainly on data ingested and user seats, with a free tier of 100 GB per month and one full-platform user.
Pros
- Generous free tier: 100 GB ingest per month, one full-platform user and unlimited basic users
- Simple model: most capabilities included, billed by GB ingested and users, not per host
- NRQL gives a powerful SQL-like query language across all telemetry
- Compute-based pricing option bills for query compute instead of user seats
- Cost-effective for large host counts with modest data volume
- Strong APM heritage with good code-level diagnostics
Cons
- Full-platform users are expensive ($349/user/month on Pro annual)
- Per-GB ingest at $0.40 ($0.60 for Data Plus) adds up for log-heavy workloads
- UI and product breadth feel less cohesive than Datadog's
- Fewer integrations and less depth in security products
- Private-equity ownership since 2023 makes long-term roadmap less transparent
Best For
Small to mid-size teams with many hosts but few engineers who need full access, and anyone who wants to start free.
Pricing models: per host vs per GB and per user
Datadog prices each product separately. Infrastructure monitoring is $15 per host per month on Pro and $23 on Enterprise with annual billing ($18 and $27 on-demand), and the free tier covers up to five hosts with one day of metric retention. APM adds $31 per host per month when bundled with infrastructure on annual billing, or $48 on-demand. Logs are billed twice: from $0.10 per GB ingested, then $1.70 per million events indexed for 15-day retention on annual terms. Users are free. New Relic flips the axes. Most capabilities, including infrastructure, APM, logs and browser monitoring, are included, and you pay for data ingested and for users. The free tier includes 100 GB of ingest per month, one full-platform user and unlimited basic users. Beyond that, ingest costs $0.40 per GB, or $0.60 per GB on Data Plus with longer retention and extra governance. Full-platform users cost $349 per month on Pro annual, with cheaper Core seats at $49 and a Standard tier for small teams. The result: Datadog scales with infrastructure footprint and product count; New Relic scales with data volume and headcount. Map your hosts, data volume and engineers before comparing quotes.
Where each bill surprises teams
Datadog bill shock usually comes from three places. Custom metrics, especially high-cardinality tags such as user IDs or container IDs, can quietly multiply metric counts. Indexed logs are far more expensive than ingested logs, so teams that index everything by default pay heavily. And autoscaling or short-lived containers raise host and container counts unexpectedly. Datadog provides usage dashboards, exclusion filters and metric controls, but someone has to own cost governance. New Relic surprises come from data volume and seats. Verbose application logs, debug-level tracing or chatty Kubernetes events can push ingest well past the 100 GB free allowance, and every gigabyte above that is billed. On the user side, granting full-platform access to every engineer gets expensive quickly on Pro, so many organisations give most people basic or core seats and reserve full access for on-call engineers. New Relic's compute-based pricing, which bills for query compute capacity instead of user seats, can help organisations with many occasional users. On both platforms, sampling traces, dropping noisy logs at the collector and setting retention deliberately are the biggest cost levers.
Product breadth and day-to-day experience
Datadog's advantage is breadth with cohesion. Infrastructure, APM, logs, real user monitoring, synthetics, database monitoring, network monitoring, CI visibility, cloud security, application security and LLM observability share one UI, one agent and consistent tagging. Jumping from a slow trace to the related host metrics and log lines is fast, and the integration catalog covers almost any service you run. That cohesion is a large part of why teams accept the higher bill. New Relic covers the core observability surface well, with particularly strong APM and code-level diagnostics, plus infrastructure, logs, browser and mobile monitoring, synthetics and error tracking. Its standout is NRQL, a SQL-like language that queries every telemetry type in one place, which power users love for custom dashboards and alerts. Its UI has improved but can feel less unified, and its security offering is narrower than Datadog's. For teams that mainly need APM, infrastructure and logs, both platforms do the job. If you also want security monitoring, extensive RUM and dozens of niche integrations in one place, Datadog is the stronger suite.
OpenTelemetry, lock-in and vendor stability
Both vendors accept OpenTelemetry data. New Relic exposes a native OTLP endpoint, and Datadog supports OTLP ingestion through its agent and the OpenTelemetry Collector. Instrumenting your services with OpenTelemetry SDKs rather than proprietary agents is the single best hedge against lock-in, because switching vendors then becomes a change of exporter configuration rather than a re-instrumentation project. Expect some feature gaps when using pure OTel data versus each vendor's own agent, particularly for profiling and deep runtime metrics. Dashboards, monitors and alert definitions remain proprietary on both platforms, so migrations still require rebuilding them. Terraform providers for both help keep that configuration in code. On vendor stability, Datadog is a public company with a long record of rapid product expansion. New Relic was taken private by Francisco Partners and TPG in a deal that completed in November 2023, and has since shifted its packaging toward consumption and compute-based options. Neither is at risk of disappearing, but private ownership means less public visibility into New Relic's roadmap and finances.
Verdict
Choose Datadog if observability is strategic, you want the widest product suite with the best correlation across signals, and you will invest in governing custom metrics and log indexing. Choose New Relic if you want to start free, have many hosts but a handful of engineers needing full access, or prefer one ingest-based bill over a dozen per-product SKUs. For startups, New Relic's 100 GB free tier is hard to beat; for large platform teams, Datadog usually wins on depth if the budget allows.