Datadog vs New Relic

Verdict

Datadog and New Relic both promise one SaaS platform for infrastructure, APM, logs and real user monitoring, and both largely deliver it — the gap between them is not capability so much as how the bill is built and how it grows. Datadog meters each product independently: infrastructure hosts, APM hosts, log ingestion, indexed log events and custom metrics are all separate line items, which gives fine control over what you turn on but means cost compounds as you enable more modules. New Relic's core pricing axis is GB of data ingested per month plus a per-user seat fee for its full-platform users, decoupling cost from the size of your fleet but tying it directly to telemetry volume and headcount instead.

That difference tends to favor different shapes of organization. A platform team with many small hosts and modest telemetry per host often finds New Relic's ingest-based model cheaper and simpler to forecast. A team that wants to turn on exactly the modules it needs — infrastructure monitoring here, APM there, logs only for a subset of services — often prefers Datadog's granular, per-product metering, even though it takes more attention to avoid surprise costs as modules are added.

Choose Datadog if

• You want the broadest single-vendor catalog (800+ integrations) and are willing to manage cost across separately metered products.
• Cloud Security Management, synthetic monitoring and session replay on the same platform matter to you.
• Your organization is comfortable actively governing which Datadog products are enabled per team.

Choose New Relic if

• You want a generous, genuinely usable free tier (100GB/month, one full user) to evaluate before committing budget.
• Predictable, ingest-and-seat-based pricing is easier for your finance team to reason about than per-product metering.
• You query everything through one language (NRQL) across APM, infra and logs rather than separate per-product interfaces.

The honest caveat

List prices for both are a starting point, not the number you will actually pay — real deployments negotiate volume discounts and commitments, and the cheaper option on paper depends heavily on your specific mix of hosts, log volume and headcount. Price both against your actual telemetry footprint, not the marketing page. See data observability and anomaly detection.