New Relic vs. Datadog

Compare New Relic vs. Datadog for Observability. We want you to choose the most suitable tool for your use case, even if it’s not us.

As cloud-native environments continue to grow in complexity, observability has become essential for ensuring the reliability, performance, and scalability of modern applications. From monitoring infrastructure health, enabling deep visibility into distributed systems, or getting real-time insights into reasoning paths, token usage of LLM Agentic applications. However, traditional vendors sliced visibility into separate products (APM, Log Management, Infrastructure Monitoring, LLM Observability) and priced them in ways that forced tradeoffs making it important for team to choosing the right observability platform is critical to operational success.

New Relic and Datadog each bring unique strengths to observability, with distinct capabilities and trade-offs. The best fit depends on your organization’s priorities—whether that’s cost efficiency, deployment flexibility, developer experience, or ecosystem integrations.

The right choice depends on your priorities: cost, control, scale, and flexibility. In the following sections, we’ll compare both platforms to help you determine which best fits your needs, even if the answer isn’t us.

New Relic vs. Datadog at a glance

New Relic
Datadog
BYOC (Data Residency, Compliance, Security)
On Prem (Data Residency, Compliance, Security)
Correlation between logs, metrics, traces
Kubernetes native
Full HTTP Payloads of Request as well as response including headers
(available via USM+ additional cost)
Smart Sampling

New Relic vs. Datadog at a glance

New Relic
Datadog
RBAC for user roles
RBAC for Pages
RBAC for Actions
Fine-grain access control to data/resources (namespace setup support) to provide access to specific teams or by data type (MELT)
In preview

New Relic vs. Datadog at a glance

New Relic
Datadog
All data types included in standard plan
APM, Logs, LLM, RUM, Infrastructure Monitoring all sold separately
APM, Logs, LLM, RUM, Infrastructure Monitoring all sold separately
No Ingestion based pricing
Additional costs based on retention
Costs increase when retention policies applied
Costs increase when retention policies applied
Additional costs for indexed data
Additional price bands for hot/cold storage
Additional price bands for hot/cold storage
Out of the box LLM Observability (tokens, hallucinations, drift)
(Requires the installation of an additional agent)
No Additional Cost
(Manual instrumentation is possible and charges will apply)
RUM
No Additional Cost
(Usage based)
(Additional charges are incurred by events + sessions)

New Relic overview

New Relic is a cloud-based observability platform that collects and analyzes telemetry data — including metrics, events, logs, and traces — across applications and infrastructure. It provides a full-stack view of digital systems with capabilities such as application performance monitoring (APM), infrastructure monitoring, synthetic monitoring, and customizable dashboards. The platform uses a single data model to unify telemetry, helping teams identify performance bottlenecks, trace dependencies, and resolve issues faster. New Relic also incorporates AI-driven insights for anomaly detection and predictive analysis, and supports real-time alerts to reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR). Its usage-based pricing model allows organizations to pay for the data they ingest, rather than committing to fixed tiers. New Relic is used by engineering teams to monitor application health, troubleshoot issues, and align observability data with business and operational outcomes.

Datadog overview

Datadog is a SaaS-based monitoring, security, and analytics platform for developers, IT operations teams, security engineers, and business users. It integrates infrastructure monitoring, application performance monitoring (APM), log management, user experience monitoring, and cloud security into a modular system where organizations can choose the components they need. The platform provides real-time observability across the entire technology stack, helping teams monitor systems, detect and resolve issues, secure applications and infrastructure, and analyze user behavior and business metrics. Datadog is used by organizations of different sizes and industries to support cloud migration, enable collaboration across technical and business teams, shorten time to market for applications, and reduce time to problem resolution.

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