Dynatrace Alternatives: Six Options Compared by Price and Fit
Prices and facts checked on vendor pages on Nov 8, 2026.
Teams leave Dynatrace for a few common reasons: the annual commitment, the number of meters on the rate card, or a stack that has shrunk to mostly logs. This page compares six options on list price, how each one meters usage, and who it suits. Sazabi wrote this page and is one of the six, so read that section with that in mind. We also say where another tool is the better pick.
What Dynatrace Charges, For Reference
Dynatrace sells a platform subscription. You make one annual spend commitment, and every capability draws it down at rate-card prices. Its pricing page says there are no penalty-style overages: usage above the commitment is billed monthly at the same rates, and larger commitments lower the unit price.
The rate card meters by the hour. Full-Stack Monitoring is $0.01 per memory-GiB-hour, shown as $58 per month for an 8 GiB host. Infrastructure Monitoring is $0.04 per host-hour ($29 per month). For logs, ingest and process is $0.20 per GiB, retain is $0.0007 per GiB-day, and query is $0.0035 per GiB scanned. A bundled option retains logs at $0.02 per GiB-day with queries included, for 10 to 35 days. The page lists unlimited seats and a 15-day free trial. Dynatrace Pricing Explained walks through the meters, and Sazabi vs Dynatrace is a direct comparison.
Six Dynatrace Alternatives At A Glance
How To Choose
- How much of Dynatrace do you use? If the answer is mostly logs, nearly every option here fits. If you depend on automatic topology, code-level profiling, and real user monitoring, check each option's scope line by line before you plan a move.
- Do you want a commitment? Dynatrace asks for an annual platform commitment. Several options below bill monthly with no commitment, and some offer discounts for one.
- Who needs access? Dynatrace lists unlimited seats. New Relic prices users by type. The rest are usage based.
- Is OpenTelemetry your collection layer? If so, switching the destination is a configuration change rather than a re-instrumentation project.
Datadog
Datadog's list prices are split by product. Infrastructure Pro is $15 per host per month billed annually ($18 month-to-month), and APM is $31 per APM host per month on annual billing. Logs have two meters: $0.10 per GB ingested, then $2.50 per million events indexed with 30-day retention on annual billing ($3.75 on-demand). Flex Logs storage is listed separately for longer retention.
Pick it when you want one vendor with a very large product catalog and are comfortable managing many line items. Skip it when you want one meter to forecast, since a single log line can touch ingest, indexing, and storage rates. See Sazabi vs Datadog and Datadog Alternatives.
New Relic
New Relic's free tier includes 100 GB of ingest per month, one full platform user, and unlimited basic users. Beyond that, ingest is $0.40 per GB, or $0.60 per GB with Data Plus. Core users are $49 per user, and full platform users on Pro are $349 per user with annual commitments ($418.80 monthly). The page also describes a compute-based model with no user licenses. Unlimited hosts are included at no extra charge.
Pick it when a modest number of engineers need the full platform and you want to stop counting hosts. Skip it when many people need full access, because user fees grow with headcount. See Sazabi vs New Relic and New Relic Alternatives.
Elastic
Elastic Observability Serverless charges for ingest and retention. Its Logs Essentials tier shows as low as $0.07 per GB ingested and $0.017 per GB retained per month. The Complete tier, marked recommended, shows as low as $0.09 and $0.019 for logs and traces, and $0.023 and $0.005 for metrics. Egress is $0.05 per GB after 50 GB free. Standard includes limited support, and Gold, Platinum, and Enterprise add 5%, 10%, or 15% of your charges. Elastic also lists hosted and self-managed deployments, with the self-managed option licensed by node and RAM.
Pick it when you want a search-first platform and the option to run it yourself. Skip it when you want a fixed monthly price, since both ingest and retention scale with volume. See Sazabi vs Elastic and Elastic Alternatives.
Grafana Cloud
Grafana Cloud's Free plan has no card requirement and includes 50 GB of logs per month with 14-day retention. Pro starts at $19 per month plus usage and keeps logs for 30 days. Host-hour pricing exists for Kubernetes and Application Observability: Application Observability starts at $0.025 per host-hour ($18 per host). Enterprise starts at a $25,000 annual spend commit.
Pick it when you already run Grafana dashboards or Prometheus and want a managed backend. Skip it when you want one flat log rate, because process, write, and retain are separate. See Sazabi vs Grafana and Grafana Alternatives.
SigNoz
SigNoz Teams starts at $49 per month and includes $49 of usage. Logs and traces are $0.30 per GB, and metrics are $0.10 per million samples. The page lists no host-based or user-based pricing, plus SOC 2 Type II and HIPAA compliance. Enterprise starts at $4,000 per month and offers dedicated cloud, bring-your-own-cloud, or self-hosted options. The comparison table also has a Community Edition column for teams that want full control and have DevOps expertise. See Sazabi vs SigNoz.
Pick it when your collection is OpenTelemetry and you want a path to self-hosting. Skip it when you need long default retention, since logs and traces list 15 days.
Sazabi
Sazabi is AI-native observability and security. Where Dynatrace meters hosts, containers, and telemetry types, Sazabi's main meters are logs ingested, logs scanned, issues, AI credits, and automation runs. It watches your logs and opens an issue when it finds a problem worth attention, without hand-built monitors, with what happened, why, and the evidence attached. Sazabi also scans connected repositories for vulnerabilities and files confirmed findings as issues. When you want a fix, it hands the investigation to your coding agent (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and others) through MCP, CLI, or API.
Plans per 30-day cycle: Hobby $50, Startup $200, and Growth $1,000. Each includes 200 GB of logs ingested, 50 GB scanned, 20 issues, and 500 AI credits. Beyond that, logs ingested and scanned are $0.10 per GB, issues are $4 each, and credits are $0.01. Retention is 7, 30, or 90 days by plan. See the Sazabi pricing page.
Pick it when logs are your main signal and you want problems surfaced for you. Skip it when you need host and process monitoring, code-level profiling, real user monitoring, or retention beyond the plan limits.
Try An Alternative Without Dropping Dynatrace
Dynatrace's pricing page lists OpenTelemetry ingest over OTLP, so many teams already run a Collector. Sazabi documents adding an otlphttp exporter to a Collector so it receives logs and traces alongside your existing destinations. Metrics are not stored by that source; Sazabi has a separate OpenTelemetry metrics source for them. See the OpenTelemetry integration for setup.
Running both for a month shows how each tool handles the same incidents. Dynatrace stays your system of record while you decide.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the cheapest Dynatrace alternative?
It depends on what you monitor and how long you keep it. Per-GB log ingest list rates on this page run from as low as $0.07 (Elastic Logs Essentials) to $0.40 (New Relic beyond the free 100 GB), but retention, search, and host fees are billed differently. Compare total cost, not one rate.
Can I replace Dynatrace logs without replacing everything?
Yes. If your logs reach Dynatrace through an OpenTelemetry Collector, you can add a second OTLP exporter that points at another tool and leave Dynatrace running while you compare.
Does Dynatrace charge per user?
Its pricing page lists unlimited seats with no per-seat fees. New Relic does charge by user type, so the two models behave differently as your team grows.
Does Sazabi replace Dynatrace APM and host monitoring?
Not based on its public pages. Sazabi focuses on logs, issue detection, search, and dashboards, and it accepts OpenTelemetry traces as searchable records. Keep Dynatrace if you rely on its host, code-level, or real user monitoring.
Sources
- Platform subscription model, host monitoring prices, log analytics rates, retention, trial (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Hourly list prices for host monitoring, log ingest, retain and query, and AI units (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Datadog host, APM and log list prices in annual, month-to-month and on-demand columns (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- New Relic free ingest, per-GB rates, user types and prices, compute option (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Elastic Observability Serverless ingest and retention rates, support percentages (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Elastic hosted, serverless and self-managed deployment options (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Grafana Cloud plans, log rates, retention, host-hour pricing, Enterprise commit (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- SigNoz Teams price, usage rates, retention, Enterprise deployment options (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Sazabi plans, included usage, overage rates, retention (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Sazabi product description and capabilities (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- How Sazabi issues differ from alerts and monitors (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Adding Sazabi as an extra OTLP destination on an OpenTelemetry Collector (accessed Nov 8, 2026)