Datadog Alternatives: Six Options Compared by Price and Fit
Prices and facts checked on vendor pages on Nov 8, 2026.
Teams look for a Datadog alternative for one of three reasons: the bill, the number of line items on the bill, or a stack that no longer needs everything Datadog sells. This page compares six options on list price, how they charge for logs, and who each one suits. One of the six is Sazabi, and Sazabi wrote this page, so read that section with that in mind. We also say when you should pick something else.
What Datadog Charges, For Reference
Datadog bills many products separately. For logs, its list price page shows $0.10 per GB ingested, plus $2.50 per million log events indexed with 30-day retention on annual billing ($3.75 on-demand). Those figures are for the US sites (US1, US3, and US5), and the page has a site selector for other regions. Hosts, APM, custom metrics, and seats are separate line items. Datadog Pricing Explained walks through each one, and Sazabi vs Datadog covers the product differences.
Six Datadog Alternatives At A Glance
How To Choose
Ask these four questions before you compare prices.
- What do you use Datadog for today? If it is mostly logs, almost any option here fits. If you rely on infrastructure host maps, APM, browser monitoring, and synthetics, check each option's coverage before you plan a move.
- Who searches the logs? Per-user pricing (New Relic) rewards small groups of heavy users. Per-GB pricing rewards teams that want everyone to have access.
- How long do you need to keep logs? Retention ranges from 7 days to years across these tools.
- Do you want to run it yourself? SigNoz lists a self-hosted option. Grafana, SigNoz, and Sazabi list bring-your-own-cloud options at enterprise tiers, and Better Stack lets you host data in your own S3 bucket as an add-on. Axiom and New Relic list no self-hosted option on their pricing pages.
SigNoz
SigNoz's Teams plan starts at $49 per month and includes $49 of usage. The page shows a struck-through $199 next to that price. After the included usage, logs and traces cost $0.30 per GB and metrics cost $0.10 per million samples. The page lists unlimited teammates, no host-based pricing, SOC 2 Type II and HIPAA compliance, and data centers in the US, EU, and India. Enterprise starts at $4,000 per month and offers dedicated cloud, bring-your-own-cloud, or self-hosted options. See SigNoz on Sazabi for the connector and Sazabi vs SigNoz for a direct comparison.
Pick it when you want one product for metrics, traces, and logs, and you like having a self-hosted path. Skip it when you want long default log retention, since the pricing page shows 15 days for logs.
Grafana Cloud
The Free plan includes 50 GB of logs per month with 14-day retention. Pro adds a $19 monthly platform fee that includes 50 GB ingested, 30-day log retention, and pay-as-you-go above the free tier. Logs run on Grafana Loki, with "starts at" rates of $0.05 per GB to process, $0.40 per GB to write, and $0.10 per GB to retain. Enterprise starts at a $25,000 annual spend commit and lists a bring-your-own-cloud deployment. The Grafana integration and Sazabi vs Grafana show how it fits next to Sazabi.
Pick it when you already use Grafana dashboards or Loki and want a managed version. Skip it when you want one flat per-GB number, since logs are split across process, write, and retain rates and volume discounts shift the final price.
New Relic
New Relic includes 100 GB of free data ingest per month and charges $0.40 per GB beyond that, or $0.60 per GB with the Data Plus option. Users are priced separately. Basic users are free. Core users are $49 per user. On the Standard edition, full platform users are $10 for the first user and $99 for each additional user, up to five. On Pro, they are $349 per user on annual commitments. The page lists 50+ capabilities and unlimited hosts. See New Relic Alternatives and Sazabi vs New Relic for more.
Pick it when a small group of engineers needs broad coverage and you want to avoid host-based pricing. Skip it when many people need full access, because user fees climb with headcount.
Better Stack
Better Stack has a free tier with 3 GB of logs retained for 3 days. For the Europe region, telemetry bundles start at $25 per month billed yearly ($30 billed monthly) for 40 GB each of logs, traces, and metrics, and every bundle includes 30-day log retention. The page has a region selector, and other regions are priced differently. Incident management is priced separately, from $29 per responder license per month on annual billing. Details are on the Better Stack integration page, and Sazabi vs Better Stack compares the two.
Pick it when you are a small team and want logs, uptime monitoring, status pages, and on-call in one place. Skip it when your volume is high enough that fixed bundles stop matching your usage.
Axiom
Axiom charges a $25 monthly platform fee, with the first 1,000 GB of ingest each month free. After that, ingest is $0.12 per GB, falling in tiers as volume grows. Queries are billed in GB-hours after 100 free, and storage is billed on compressed data (95% compression by default) with older data moving to cheaper tiers. You can pre-purchase compute credits for 12, 24, or 36 months at lower rates. The Axiom integration and Sazabi vs Axiom cover the details.
Pick it when you store a large volume of events for a long time and can predict query load. Skip it when you want a flat price with no query metering.
Sazabi
Sazabi is AI-native observability and security. You send logs, and Sazabi investigates them and opens an issue when it finds a problem worth your attention. Each issue arrives with what happened, why, and the evidence, so no monitor needs to exist first. Sazabi also files an issue for each confirmed vulnerability it finds in your connected repositories. You can ask questions in plain language, search logs, and build dashboards from the same data. When an issue needs a code change, Sazabi hands the root cause to your coding agent (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and others) through MCP, CLI, or API. Metrics and traces sent through OpenTelemetry are stored as searchable records next to your logs.
Pricing is per 30-day cycle: Hobby is $50, Startup is $200, and Growth is $1,000. Each includes 200 GB of logs ingested, 50 GB of logs scanned, 20 issues, and 500 AI credits. Beyond that, ingest and scans are $0.10 per GB and extra issues are $4 each. When a problem recurs while its issue is open or ignored, Sazabi folds the recurrence into that issue instead of opening a duplicate. Retention is 7 days on Hobby, 30 on Startup, and 90 on Growth. See Sazabi pricing for the full table.
Pick it when your main need is logs and you would rather be told about problems than write monitors. Skip it when you rely on Datadog host maps, APM views, Real User Monitoring, or synthetic tests. Sazabi's docs do not describe host maps or APM views. Sazabi's Browser and React Native SDKs capture errors, console output, network calls with trace context, user interactions, navigation and session identity from web and mobile apps. They do not capture Core Web Vitals or session replay. Sazabi does not offer synthetic checks, so keep your synthetic monitoring tool for those. Also skip it if you need log retention beyond the plan limits.
Try An Alternative Without Dropping Datadog
You do not have to cut over in one step. The Datadog Agent can send logs to a second destination, and Sazabi documents two ways to do it: dual-ship, which keeps your Datadog pipeline and adds Sazabi, or Sazabi-only. The Agent must be v6.18 or later, or v7.18 or later. Only the Agent's logs pipeline is forwarded, so metrics and APM traces stay in Datadog. If your telemetry already flows through OpenTelemetry, that is another way to add a second destination.
Sazabi can also connect to your Datadog account as an MCP connector, so its agent can query Datadog metrics, logs, traces, monitors, and dashboards during an investigation. See the Datadog integration for both paths. A month of overlap shows you real numbers before you decide anything.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the cheapest Datadog alternative?
It depends on volume and how you search. Axiom gives the first 1,000 GB of ingest each month for free, and Grafana Cloud and New Relic have free tiers. Per-GB rates differ and each one includes different things, so run your own volume through each pricing page.
Is there an open source Datadog alternative?
SigNoz lists a self-hosted Community option on its pricing page, and Grafana Loki powers the logs product in Grafana Cloud. Self-hosting means your team runs storage, scaling, and upgrades.
Can I replace Datadog logs without replacing everything?
Yes. Many teams move logs first because log volume drives much of the bill. The Datadog Agent can send logs to a second destination, so you can test an alternative while Datadog stays on.
Does Sazabi replace Datadog APM and infrastructure monitoring?
Not fully. Sazabi ingests OpenTelemetry metrics (Prometheus metrics through an OpenTelemetry Collector) and OTLP traces through the same intake as your logs. It stores each metric data point and each span as a log record that its agent queries alongside your logs, so there is no separate metrics store to run. Sazabi's Browser and React Native SDKs capture errors, console output, network calls with trace context, user interactions, navigation and session identity from web and mobile apps. They do not capture Core Web Vitals or session replay. Sazabi does not offer synthetic checks, so keep your synthetic monitoring tool for those. Its docs do not describe host maps or APM service views either, so keep Datadog for those if you need them.
How does Sazabi pricing compare to Datadog?
Datadog lists $0.10 per GB ingested plus $2.50 per million events indexed with 30-day retention on annual billing. Sazabi charges $0.10 per GB ingested and $0.10 per GB scanned after included allowances. Datadog also bills hosts, APM, and seats separately, which this logs-only comparison leaves out.
Sources
- Datadog log ingestion and indexing list prices, US sites, annual and on-demand columns (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- SigNoz Teams price, log and trace rates, retention, compliance, Enterprise options (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Grafana Cloud Free and Pro plans, log rates, retention, Enterprise commit (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- New Relic free ingest, per-GB rates, user types and user prices (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Better Stack free tier, telemetry bundles for the Europe region, 30-day log retention, responder license price (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Axiom platform fee, ingest tiers, query compute, storage tiers (accessed Nov 7, 2026)
- Sazabi plans, included allowances, per-unit rates, retention (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Sazabi positioning and product description (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- How issues differ from alerts and monitors, repeats, rejections, vulnerability issues (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Sazabi bring-your-own-cloud availability on AWS under an enterprise agreement (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Metrics and traces arrive through OpenTelemetry and are stored as searchable records (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Datadog Agent dual-ship and Sazabi-only setup, version requirements (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Datadog MCP connector capabilities (accessed Nov 8, 2026)