Datadog vs New Relic
Datadog and New Relic are both evaluated in the CIOPages Observability & APM Platforms Buyer's Guide. The guide groups Datadog under All-in-One SaaS and New Relic under Consumption Model.
| Attribute | Datadog | New Relic |
|---|---|---|
| Approach | All-in-One SaaS | Consumption Model |
| Best for | Cloud-native enterprises that want maximum breadth and correlation in a single SaaS platform and are prepared to actively manage the cost curve | Mid-market and developer-focused teams that want strong APM with usage-based pricing and a low-friction, free-tier on-ramp |
From the Observability & APM Platforms Buyer's Guide, updated June 2026. 8 vendors evaluated.
Datadog
The default “see everything in one place” choice for cloud-native estates, and you must govern volume and cardinality early: hundreds of integrations spanning infrastructure, APM, logs, RUM, synthetics, profiling, and a fast-growing security and AI-observability line including LLM and agent monitoring, with excellent Kubernetes and cloud coverage, polished UX, and relentless product expansion. The multi-axis model — per-host, per-product, and per-GB — compounds into bills that scale faster than your infrastructure, and adding log or LLM monitoring is a frequent cause of bill shock. Proprietary-agent gravity and module stacking make true cost forecasting hard.
New Relic
Start free and stay competitive at mid-market scale, but check the per-user line before you commit: a long APM heritage paired with a simplified consumption model billing on data ingested plus billable users, a genuinely generous free tier at 100GB of ingest a month, strong developer experience, and full-stack coverage on one telemetry database. It is now privately held under Francisco Partners and TPG, so track roadmap and support investment under PE ownership. That per-user line can surprise large teams even when ingest looks cheap, platform breadth trails Datadog, and AIOps trails Dynatrace.
Also evaluated in this guide
Chronosphere, Dynatrace, Elastic Observability, Grafana Labs, Honeycomb, Splunk Observability
Related comparisons
- Datadog vs Dynatrace
- Dynatrace vs New Relic
- Chronosphere vs Datadog
- Datadog vs Honeycomb
- New Relic vs Honeycomb
Editors choose the vendors and write the evaluations. Paying CIOPages does not change how a vendor is covered. Editorial policy