New Relic vs Datadog
New Relic and Datadog are both broad American observability platforms; they differ on the meter. New Relic charges $0.40 per GB beyond a free 100 GB a month, plus per user, and takes OTLP natively. Datadog prices each product separately, mostly per host, plus logs. Container-heavy teams with few users pick New Relic; host-based estates with many users pick Datadog.
Vendors can pay for visibility on this site; it never changes what we say about a product. How that works.
Choose New Relic ifyou run many small containers, only a handful of engineers need full access, you instrument with OpenTelemetry, and you want to begin on a free allowance.
Choose Datadog ifyou have a stable number of hosts, a large group of people needs full access, you are content to buy infrastructure, APM and logs as separately priced products, and you can govern tags and log volume.
New Relic and Datadog side by side
| New Relic | Datadog | |
|---|---|---|
| Our application performance monitoring rank | #11 of 15 | #13 of 15 |
| Established in | United States | United States |
| Pricing | Free tier of 100 GB a month; then per GB ingested plus per core and full-platform user, published | Free tier to 5 hosts; per host per month plus per GB of logs and per custom metric, published |
| List price, 30 September 2026 | $0.40 per GB ingested beyond 100 GB free per month; full platform users on Standard $10 for the first and $99 for each additional, up to five | Infrastructure Pro from $15 per host per month billed annually; APM from $31 per host per month billed annually alongside Infrastructure |
| Free tier | Yes | Yes |
| Open source | — | — |
| Self-hostable | — | — |
| Built for | Container fleets where host counting would be punishing | Organisations that want every observability product from one vendor |
| Not for | Large groups of occasional viewers who all need full access | Teams that need the bill to be predictable month to month |
Both are reviewed in full in our application performance monitoring ranking: New Relic and Datadog.
Where they differ
New Relic 3 · Datadog 1 · open 1- 01
The shape of the invoice
New Relic lists $0.40 per GB ingested beyond 100 GB free each month, plus users. Datadog lists Infrastructure Pro at $15 and APM at $31 per host per month on annual billing, then logs at $0.10 per GB ingested and $1.70 per million events indexed, with custom metrics beyond the included allotment billed on usage. Fewer lines are easier to reason about, and host counting punishes small containers.
Edge: New Relic
- 02
Seats for a large team
New Relic's basic users are free, core users cost $49 a month, and full platform users cost $349 a month each on Pro with an annual commitment; Standard caps full platform users at five. Pro and Enterprise can instead choose compute-based pricing with no user licences. Datadog's pricing page lists no seat price for infrastructure, APM or logs.
Edge: Datadog
- 03
OpenTelemetry portability
New Relic accepts OTLP natively as a first-class input alongside its own agents, so instrumentation written in OpenTelemetry stays portable. Datadog supports OTLP as well, but the native Datadog Agent works better and is where the product invests. If you intend to keep the option of leaving, New Relic makes that simpler.
Edge: New Relic
- 04
Product coverage
Both are full platforms. Datadog groups its catalogue into observability, security, digital experience, software delivery and service management, and cites more than 1,000 integrations. New Relic lists APM, infrastructure, logs, browser, mobile, synthetics, network and database monitoring, session replay and an errors inbox, with over 800 integrations. The practical difference is packaging: New Relic's capabilities share one ingest meter, Datadog's are priced individually.
Depends on the buyer
- 05
Starting for free
New Relic's free tier includes 100 GB of ingest a month, unlimited basic users and one full platform user, which is enough to run a small production service. Datadog's free infrastructure tier covers up to five hosts with one day of metric retention, and APM is a paid product from $31 per host per month on annual billing.
Edge: New Relic
When neither fits
Neither fits a team that wants a hosted service built on a stack it could run itself, or one that already runs Elasticsearch. Grafana Cloud is the hosted version of a stack you may run yourself, and Elastic Observability keeps logs, traces and metrics in one searchable store.
New Relic or Datadog: questions
4 answersIs New Relic cheaper than Datadog?
It depends on your estate. New Relic gives 100 GB a month free and then charges $0.40 per GB, but a full platform user on Pro is $349 a month.
Datadog charges $15 per host for Infrastructure Pro and $31 for APM on annual billing, plus logs, with no listed seat price.
Does New Relic or Datadog work better with OpenTelemetry?
New Relic offers a native OTLP endpoint and describes its support as first-class, ingesting all OTLP data.
Datadog also ingests OTLP, but its compatibility table shows that Continuous Profiler, Database Monitoring and Universal Service Monitoring are unavailable on an OpenTelemetry-only setup. For portable instrumentation, New Relic is the more straightforward.
Why do Datadog bills surprise people more than New Relic bills?
Datadog runs several meters at once, and nothing in the console stops an engineer adding a tag that multiplies custom metrics, so a noisy deployment causes overage. New Relic's surprise comes from a different place: the cost of full-platform user seats.
Where do New Relic and Datadog store data?
New Relic offers data centre regions in the United States, the European Union and Japan.
Datadog lists hosted sites in the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, Japan and Australia, plus US government sites. With both, the region is a property of the account, so choose it at sign-up.
Sources
Checked 30 September 2026- New Relic pricing page: free allowance, per-GB rate, user prices per edition and the compute-based option.
- New Relic platform page: the list of platform capabilities and the 800+ integrations figure.
- New Relic OpenTelemetry documentation: native OTLP endpoint and first-class OpenTelemetry support.
- New Relic data centre documentation: US, EU and Japan regions.
- Datadog pricing page: per-host prices, log pricing, custom metric allotments and the free tier.
- Datadog product page: the product areas Datadog groups its catalogue into.
- Datadog OpenTelemetry documentation: OTLP ingestion routes and the 1,000+ integrations figure.
- Datadog OpenTelemetry compatibility table: features unavailable with an OpenTelemetry-only setup.
- Datadog site documentation: the list of hosted Datadog sites and their locations.