Datadog is a powerful monitoring tool for servers, apps, and logs, but its complexity and rising costs lead many teams to explore better, more affordable alternatives.
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Datadog is a huge monitoring tool that pulls key metrics from servers, databases, apps, and more. It turns raw data into charts and reports, and you can customize dashboards to keep tabs on your entire system. It also processes logs in real time, letting you easily search, monitor, and set alerts for any issues.
However, while it offers a lot of power, Datadog's setup can be a bit of a headache, and the cost can spiral quickly, especially for smaller teams. That's why many are looking for Datadog. For a deeper look at top options in this space, check out The 10 Best Server Monitoring Tools: Pros, Cons, and Pricing for an in-depth comparison.
Let's dive into what makes Datadog great and where it falls short, so we can better explore the options out there.
Pros and Cons of Datadog
Before we dive into the alternatives, let's take a closer look at what makes Datadog a popular choice for monitoring, and where it might not be the best fit. Like any tool, Datadog has its strengths and weaknesses, so understanding both can help you decide if it's the right option or if it's time to consider something else. Let's break it down.
Pros
- Extremely comprehensive solution for observability
- Hundreds of integrations
Cons
- Incredibly expensive, especially at scale
- Can be overwhelming with all the products and integrations, especially for new users
The 10 Best Datadog Alternatives in 2025
If you're looking for a Datadog alternative that's both simple and affordable, Pinghome is a great choice. It provides all the essential monitoring features you need, like uptime tracking, server health, and API monitoring, without the complexity or high price tag of Datadog.
Pinghome focuses on what matters most: keeping your critical systems healthy. You get server monitoring for CPU, memory, disk, and network activity. You also get API tracking, SSL certificate monitoring, and cron job checks. It's all about maintaining the uptime and performance of your systems in a way that's easy to manage.
Why Choose Pinghome?
- Server Monitoring Made Easy: Track your system's health with core metrics such as CPU usage, memory, and network traffic.
- Real-Time Alerts: Get notified immediately when something goes wrong, whether it's an API failure or an expiring SSL certificate.
- Incident Management: Set up custom alert rules so the right team members are notified right away, reducing response time and minimizing downtime.
- Automated Status Pages: Keep both your team and users informed with real-time status updates, all without manual effort.
- API Monitoring: Monitor your APIs' performance, including response times and data integrity, to ensure they're working as expected.
Pinghome's pricing is clear and simple, with options to fit different needs:
- Starter (€8.75/month): Best for solo developers or small projects. Includes 1-minute checks, 15 uptime monitors, and 1 server monitor.
- Basic (€25/month): For small teams. Supports up to 100 uptime monitors, 5 server monitors, and integrations with Slack and Discord.
- Pro (€87.50/month): For growing teams. Offers up to 200 uptime monitors, 15 server monitors, and dedicated support.
- Enterprise (Custom Pricing): For larger organizations with custom needs, including setup assistance, consulting, and premium support.
New Relic is a full-stack observability platform with powerful monitoring for applications, infrastructure, and logs. It includes APM with transaction tracing, infrastructure monitoring for servers and containers, and centralized log management. Other features include synthetic monitoring to detect issues proactively and AI-driven analytics for faster troubleshooting. Everything is available under a single-user plan, unlike Datadog's modular product structure.
With strong APM capabilities and deep visibility across systems, New Relic is a solid choice for teams needing a reliable monitoring solution. It supports browser and mobile monitoring, serverless tracking, and extensive integrations. AI-powered insights help teams detect anomalies quickly, making troubleshooting faster and more efficient.
Still not a fan? Check out the top New Relic alternatives in 2025.
New Relic uses a usage-based pricing model that combines data ingestion, user access, and advanced computing capabilities. The Free plan includes 100GB of data ingestion per month, with extra data costing $0.35 per GB or $0.55 per GB with Data Plus for compliance features.
There are three user types: Basic (free), Core ($49/user), and Full Platform ($99+ per user, depending on plan). Access to features depends on user type, but pricing details can feel vague, especially for advanced computing capabilities like New Relic AI and Live Archives, which are not clearly defined in standard plans.
Dynatrace is one of the strongest Datadog alternatives, offering full-stack observability with AI-driven automation and deep infrastructure insights. Its OneAgent technology collects application, network, and infrastructure metrics from a single deployment, reducing setup complexity. It excels at APM, container monitoring, network analysis, and user experience tracking, making it a favorite among large enterprises with complex environments.
However, Dynatrace remains heavily geared toward large-scale organizations. The platform's steep learning curve, complex pricing structure, and resource-intensive agent may not be ideal for smaller teams. Still, for enterprises needing AI-powered root cause analysis, cloud automation, and deep visibility, Dynatrace is a top-tier choice.
Dynatrace uses a usage-based pricing model, with costs varying based on the services you use. Here's a breakdown of some key pricing details:
- Full-Stack Monitoring: Priced at $0.08 per hour for an 8 GiB host, which equals $57.60 per host, per month (based on 720 hours). This includes APM, Kubernetes monitoring, and AIOps.
- Infrastructure Monitoring: Costs $0.04 per hour per host, translating to $28.80 per host, per month for cloud platforms, containers, and network observability.
- Real User Monitoring: $0.00225 per session, making costs highly variable based on usage.
- Synthetic Monitoring: $0.001 per synthetic request, meaning costs scale with the number of tests you run.
- Log Management & Analytics: $0.20 per GiB for ingestion, plus $0.02 per GiB per day for retention (10 to 35 days).
Splunk is a comprehensive platform for log management, security analytics, and monitoring. It helps organizations ingest, index, and analyze machine-generated data from servers, apps, and other sources.
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With real-time data monitoring and powerful search capabilities, it offers insights into system performance, security events, and more. Its SIEM functionality also makes it ideal for security-focused use cases.
Recently, Splunk acquired AppDynamics to expand its observability tools and better compete with Datadog. However, Splunk's complex pricing model and resource-heavy nature may make it more suitable for large enterprises than for small or mid-sized businesses.
Unsure which to pick between Splunk and Datadog? We’ve compared them both already. Make sure you check it out here.
Splunk's pricing is split into three categories: Security, Observability, and Platform.
While Observability Cloud starts at $15 per host/month, App & Infra monitoring is priced at $60 per host/month, and End-to-End monitoring starts at $75 per host/month. Infrastructure Monitoring is available at $15 per host/month and APM at $55 per host/month. However, Security and Platform categories do not have publicly available pricing.
Prometheus is a leading option among Datadog open-source alternatives, particularly suited for highly dynamic, containerized environments. It collects metrics from a variety of sources and uses the powerful PromQL querying language for flexible data visualization and querying. With a large community of exporters, Prometheus has gained widespread adoption and offers built-in alerting based on metric thresholds, making it an excellent tool for monitoring and proactive alerting.
That said, Prometheus does come with some limitations. It is not secure by default and requires separate access control implementations. Its long-term storage capabilities are also limited, meaning you'll need additional tools for data retention. Additionally, Prometheus lacks built-in support for distributed tracing and logging. Despite these drawbacks, Prometheus remains a powerful choice for organizations looking for Datadog free alternatives, especially in cloud-native environments.
Prometheus Pricing
Unlike many open-source tools that have some hidden fees or set-up costs, Prometheus is completely free to use. But, that doesn't mean that it won't cost you anything. Open-source tools still cost money to maintain, and they can often end up being more expensive than an out-of-the-box solution.
Grafana is probably one of the most used Datadog open source alternatives, among those who want a self-managed observability stack. It gives you full control over logs, metrics, and traces with the LGTM stack, which includes Loki for logs, Grafana for visualization, Tempo for tracing, and Mimir for metrics. It's highly customizable, works with many data sources, and is popular in cloud-native environments.
Managing it yourself does come with challenges. Setup, scaling, and maintenance are on you, and while the core is open source, costs can creep up if you need advanced features. If you're looking for flexibility without vendor lock-in, Grafana is a solid choice.
Grafana is a free to use, open-srouce alternative to Datadog, but they also offer a cloud solution. It offers a flexible pricing model, starting with a Free Forever plan and scaling up as needed.
- Free Plan ($0/month): Comes with 10k metrics, 50GB logs/traces/profiles, 50k frontend sessions, and 100k synthetic test executions. Community support only.
- Pro Plan (from $19/month): Increases usage limits, adds 8x5 support, and allows pay-as-you-go pricing for extra resources.
- Advanced Plan (from $299/month): Doubles resource limits, includes enterprise plugins, and provides 24x7 support.
Checkmk is a solid option if you're only using Datadog for infrastructure monitoring and want a more self-managed solution. It doesn't have all the bells and whistles of Datadog, but it covers the essentials like servers, networks, containers, and cloud providers. With over 2,000 plug-ins, auto-discovery, and a high-performance core, Checkmk can handle large-scale environments while keeping resource usage low.
Security is another strong point with built-in encryption, 2FA, and granular access control. It lacks advanced APM and security monitoring, but if you need scalable, automated infrastructure monitoring without Datadog's pricing, Checkmk is worth considering.
Checkmk offers flexible pricing to fit most IT infrastructure. Here's a breakdown:
- Raw: Free. Provides basic monitoring with 2,000+ plugins, auto-discovery, and community support. Suitable for mid-sized IT environments.
- Enterprise: From €175/month (billed annually). Includes everything in the Raw Edition, plus automation, scaling capabilities, and support for enterprise-wide monitoring.
- Cloud: From €250/month (billed annually). Adds cloud-specific monitoring features, including support for cloud workloads, deployment from cloud marketplaces, and advanced visualization.
- MSP: From €275/month (billed annually). Designed for IT service providers, with features for multi-customer management, data segregation, and white-label branding.
Sumo Logic is a cloud-based log management and analytics platform, making it a strong alternative to Datadog for monitoring and analyzing performance in real time. It centralizes log data from servers, apps, and cloud services, offering powerful search and analysis tools for detecting issues and trends.
While it provides scalability and SIEM functionality, Sumo Logic can be complex to set up and may be costly for smaller organizations. Additionally, its limited offline capabilities may not suit all use cases, especially compared to Datadog's broader offering.
Sumo Logic offers a flexible pricing model based on data usage, but it's complicated. The Free plan provides limited log and metric capacity, while the Essentials plan scales with usage, offering more data and real-time alerting. The Enterprise Suite and Flex plans provide unlimited data, but pricing varies based on usage and configuration.
Exact prices are not listed, and costs depend on factors like data volume, retention, and deployment region. For custom requirements, Sumo Logic encourages potential customers to contact sales for personalized estimates.
LogicMonitor is a SaaS-based hybrid observability platform designed to help organizations monitor and optimize their entire IT infrastructure. As an alternative to Datadog, it provides AI-powered AIOps capabilities, including anomaly detection, root cause analysis, and forecasting, making it ideal for infrastructure monitoring.
The platform offers unified monitoring for cloud, infrastructure, and application performance, with over 3,000 integrations. Features like dynamic topology mapping, automated discovery, and service insights make it easier to visualize and manage infrastructure dependencies. LogicMonitor is particularly known for reducing alert noise and improving mean time to resolution (MTTR).
LogicMonitor offers straightforward and predictable pricing, albeit still expensive. With a focus on scalability for both hybrid and multi-cloud environments, pricing is based on resources, with volume discounts available for large deployments.
- Infrastructure Monitoring: $22 per resource/month (e.g., server, virtual machine, SD-WAN)
- Cloud IaaS Monitoring: $22 per resource/month (e.g., AWS EC2, Azure VM, GCP Compute Engine)
- Wireless Monitoring: Starting at $4 per resource/month (e.g., Cisco Meraki, Ubiquiti UniFi)
- Cloud PaaS & Container Monitoring: $3 per resource/month (e.g., AWS, Azure, Kubernetes)
- Log Intelligence: Starting at $2.50 per GB/month with retention options up to 1 year
Nagios is a well-known open-source monitoring tool that tracks applications, services, operating systems, network protocols, and infrastructure. With a vast plugin ecosystem, it's highly customizable, offering robust alerting and notification features that keep IT teams on top of issues.
That said, Nagios can be challenging to configure, requiring manual setup that may be a hassle for teams with limited resources. Its interface also feels a bit dated compared to modern alternatives. Still, for organizations that need deep monitoring and flexibility, Nagios remains a solid choice
Nagios offers a free open-source version (Nagios Core), but for more features and support, you can opt for Nagios XI. Pricing for XI starts at $1,995 for 50 nodes and goes up to $23,995 for unlimited nodes. Additional enterprise features are available as an add-on, starting at $4,490 for 100 nodes.
Conclusion
At the end of the day, choosing the right Datadog alternative really depends on what you're after. Tools like Sumo Logic, LogicMonitor, and Nagios each bring something to the table, but they can also come with a steep learning curve or overly complex pricing.
If you're looking for something simpler, more intuitive, and focused on what matters, Pinghome is the one. It makes infrastructure monitoring and incident management easy without the unnecessary fluff and gigantic price tag. With a quick setup and all the essential features you need, Pinghome is the perfect, no-nonsense alternative to Datadog. Simple, effective, and ready to go when you are.
