Datadog vs New Relic
A source-aware comparison of pricing, documented capabilities and workflow fit.
Short answer
- Price: not directly comparable — Datadog is from $15/user/mo, New Relic is free tier available.
- How to start: Datadog is from $15/user/mo, New Relic is free tier available.
- Where they differ: on what we checked they match — both offer public api, mobile app and sso (saml).
These lines are generated from the pricing we track, not from a paid placement. How we score tools.
What Datadog is
Datadog is a comprehensive monitoring and security platform for cloud-scale applications. It provides full visibility across your entire stack—from infrastructure and logs to application performance and user experience. By centralizing all your metrics into one platform, Datadog allows teams to detect performance issues, troubleshoot outages, and optimize their systems in real-time. It is the premier choice for organizations running complex, microservices-based architectures in the cloud.
What New Relic is
New Relic is a full observability platform covering application performance, infrastructure, logs and browser monitoring. The pricing model charges per user and per gigabyte of data ingested.
Side by side
| Datadog | New Relic | |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Developer Tools | Developer Tools |
| How to start | $15/user/moverified | Free tiernot a monthly price |
| Public API | Yes | Yes |
| Mobile app | Yes | Yes |
| Open source / self-hostable | No | No |
| SSO (SAML) | Yes | Yes |
| Visit | Datadog ↗ | New Relic ↗ |
What Datadog is built to do
- APM (Tracing)
- Monitor every single request to find bottlenecks in your code and databases.
- Log Management
- Search and analyze all your application logs in one central, fast interface.
- Infrastructure Monitor
- Get real-time insights into the health of your servers and containers.
- Real User Monitoring
- See exactly how your frontend performs for real people around the world.
Choose Datadog if
- DevOps Engineers and Enterprise IT Teams.
Choose New Relic if
- Teams that want application, infrastructure and log monitoring from a single vendor.
Evidence and freshness
Where a claim on this page comes from a vendor page, it is linked here.
Datadog: pros & cons
- Single Source of Truth: Monitor your entire stack in one unified dashboard.
- Deep Visibility: Trace every request across different services for fast debugging.
- Powerful Alerts: Use AI to detect anomalies and notify your team before a crash.
- Infinite Scaling: Built to handle millions of metrics from massive server clusters.
- High Cost: Pricing can become very expensive as you scale and add more modules.
- Complexity: The sheer volume of features and data can be overwhelming at first.
- Configuration Heavy: Setting up advanced monitoring and logs requires significant effort.
New Relic: pros & cons
- Broad coverage in one product
- Generous free data allowance
- Strong application tracing
- Data-volume pricing can escalate without warning
- Interface is dense and takes learning
- Per-user pricing discourages wide access
Our verdict on Datadog
The most powerful and comprehensive monitoring tool for modern cloud-native enterprises.
Our verdict on New Relic
Capable and complete. Watch the ingest bill: teams are far more often surprised by cost here than by capability.