Coralogix vs Datadog: Units, Pipelines and Host-Based Pricing
Prices and facts checked on vendor pages on Nov 8, 2026.
Coralogix and Datadog sit at opposite ends of how observability gets priced. Coralogix sells one currency, a $1.50 unit, and asks you to route each stream of data to a pipeline that decides what that gigabyte costs. Datadog sells many products, each with its own meter, and rewards you for deciding what to index. Sazabi wrote this page from each vendor's published pages, checked on 2026-11-08.
The Short Answer
Pick Coralogix if most of your spend is log volume, you want your data to land in your own S3 bucket, and you are willing to classify data into pipelines up front. Pick Datadog if you need a wide catalog of products behind one login, such as APM, RUM, security and AI agents, and you are comfortable managing indexes and per-product bills.
Coralogix vs Datadog at a Glance
How Coralogix Charges
Coralogix's pricing page shows $0.42 per GB for logs, $0.16 per GB for traces, $0.06 per GB for metrics and $1.50 per 1M tokens for AI, with one unit equal to $1.50. The unit rate for a gigabyte depends on the pipeline. The page gives Frequent Search at $1.15 per GB and Monitoring at $0.50 per GB, and Coralogix's data usage documentation lists logs at 0.75 units per GB for High priority, 0.32 for Medium, 0.12 for Low and 0.08 for Blocked. Low priority therefore works out to $0.18 per GB at the $1.50 unit price.
Two details matter for planning. First, blocked data still costs 0.08 units per GB, because blocking removes storage but not ingestion processing. Second, TCO policies are not retroactive, so a new policy applies only to data ingested after you save it. All amounts here are list prices checked on Nov 8, 2026.
How Datadog Charges
On Datadog's price list, a log line can be billed twice: $0.10 per ingested GB, then $1.06 to $2.50 per million indexed events for 3 to 30 days of retention on annual billing. Flex Logs storage and Flex Logs Starter are separate lines at $0.05 and $0.60 per million events. The rest of the stack has its own SKUs, such as APM at $31 per APM host per month, Cloud SIEM at $5 per million analyzed events, and Session Replay at $2.50 per 1,000 sessions as an add-on for RUM and Product Analytics.
A 1 TB Log Example
Assume 1,000 GB of logs per month at about 1 KB per event, or roughly a billion events, with annual billing and no other products.
The point is the mix, not the winner. Coralogix gets cheaper as more of your data moves to the Low pipeline, and Datadog gets cheaper as less of your data is indexed. If you search most of what you send, expect to land near the top of both ranges.
Where the Models Differ
Pipelines versus indexes. Coralogix's TCO Optimizer assigns High (Frequent Search), Medium (Monitoring), Low (Compliance) or Blocked priority by application, subsystem and severity, or with a DataPrime expression filter. Datadog's indexes segment logs into groups with their own retention and quotas, and exclusion filters drop what you do not need to search.
Where long retention lives. Coralogix writes data to your S3 bucket and queries it from its UI, so long retention is a property of your bucket. Datadog's long-retention options are Flex Logs, which separates storage from compute so you size query capacity for what you need, and archives in your own bucket.
Breadth. Coralogix's data usage documentation groups billing into logs, metrics, traces, binary data such as session recordings and source maps, profiles and AI. Datadog splits the equivalent surface across many separately priced products, which gives finer control and more line items to forecast.
Overage behavior. Coralogix sets a daily unit quota, warns at 80%, and either blocks data until 00
UTC or continues under Pay-As-You-Go up to 2X. Datadog's model is a monthly commitment, with on-demand billing above it and optional daily quotas on each index.AI. Olly answers questions in natural language, can drive an investigation itself, and accepts a GitHub repository for code-aware work. Datadog's Bits Investigation is the comparable agent, iterating on hypotheses from telemetry.
When to Pick Coralogix
- Log volume dominates your bill and most of it is rarely queried.
- You want the full-fidelity copy in your own S3 bucket.
- You prefer a single unit price across logs, metrics, traces and AI.
- Your team is willing to build and maintain TCO policies, and to learn DataPrime.
When to Pick Datadog
- You need a product per problem: APM, RUM, Cloud SIEM, Error Tracking, and an AI investigation agent.
- You already pay per host and want logs priced the same way as the rest of the stack.
- You want index-level retention and quotas you can tune team by team.
- Your engineers already know Datadog's UI and search syntax.
Where Sazabi Fits
Sazabi is AI-native observability and security, and it does not require you to leave either vendor. A Datadog Agent can dual-ship logs to Sazabi with logs_config.additional_endpoints while Datadog keeps receiving them, and a Coralogix customer on an OpenTelemetry Collector can add one more exporter. Only logs are forwarded from the Datadog Agent, so metrics and APM stay where they are. 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. The agent investigates in Slack and opens issues. Compare each vendor one on one in Sazabi vs Coralogix and Sazabi vs Datadog, or see Sazabi pricing.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a Coralogix unit and how does it compare to Datadog billing?
A Coralogix unit is $1.50 of logs, metrics or traces, and the number of units a gigabyte costs depends on the pipeline it is routed to. Datadog has no single unit: you pay per host, per ingested GB, per million indexed events and per product, each at its own rate.
Where does Coralogix store my data compared to Datadog?
Coralogix says all data is written to your own Amazon S3 bucket and that you choose retention there, with hot Frequent Search retention set separately. Datadog stores indexed logs in its own platform and can also forward archives to your S3, Azure Storage or Google Cloud Storage bucket.
What happens when you exceed your Coralogix plan versus a Datadog daily quota?
Coralogix alerts at 80% of the daily plan, and Pay-As-You-Go can continue ingestion up to 2X the quota; otherwise data is blocked until 00:00 UTC. Datadog index daily quotas are optional hard limits on stored logs that reset at 2:00pm UTC by default, and logs indexed above a monthly commitment are billed on demand.
Which has the broader AI assistant, Coralogix Olly or Datadog Bits?
Both describe autonomous investigation agents. Olly can connect a GitHub repository for code-aware investigations and is reachable through the Coralogix MCP server. Bits Investigation forms hypotheses from Datadog telemetry to find root causes. Their pricing differs: Coralogix lists AI at $1.50 per 1M tokens, Datadog lists AI Credits at $500 per 500-credit bundle.
Sources
- Per-GB headline prices for logs, traces, metrics and AI, the $1.50 unit, Frequent Search and Monitoring rates, S3 storage and retention FAQ, quota behavior, 14-day trial (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Units per GB by TCO priority for logs and traces, metrics at 30 GB per unit, billing pillars including binary session recordings, profiles and AI (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- TCO priorities High, Medium, Low and Blocked, blocked data still billed, policies not retroactive, DataPrime expression filters (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Olly AI observability agent, autonomous investigations, GitHub repository connection, MCP server (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- OpenTelemetry Collector setups for sending data to Coralogix (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- DataPrime query language (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Host, log ingestion, indexed event, Flex Logs, RUM, Session Replay, Cloud SIEM and AI Credit list prices (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Flex Logs decouples storage from compute for long-term retention; compute sizes by log volume (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Index exclusion filters, retention per index and daily quotas that reset at 2:00pm UTC by default (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Archives forwarded to your own S3, Azure Storage or Google Cloud Storage bucket (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Bits Investigation autonomous investigation agent (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Dual-shipping Datadog Agent logs to Sazabi with logs_config.additional_endpoints; only logs are forwarded (accessed Nov 8, 2026)