Datadog vs. New Relic Comparison

Who should you choose and why?

✋ Most important consideration

• Although New Relic’s observability tooling is comprehensive, if you’re looking for a more broad-based monitoring solution from a single vendor relationship, Datadog has 17 other products to combine with its APM and Code Profiling capabilities.

🤔 Strongly consider Datadog over New Relic if

• You have a scaleup tech company with a dedicated DevOps and/or SRE team.
• You need continuous code profiling to detect performance issues in the code itself.
• You need much more flexible or customizable dashboarding for distribution to different types of teams.
• You need roll-back or automatic configuration changes (including for cloud cost optimization).

🤔 Strongly consider New Relic over Datadog if

• You’d rather have dynamic instrumentation with language-independent agents over manual instrumentation and want support for 3rd party agents (OTEL/Prometheus).
• You run a complex hybrid environment, including monoliths, SOA, and microservice-based architectures.

📝Other Notes

• While Datadog tends to have the lower-priced offering for most use cases, New Relic prices are based on the volume of data (GB) through the platform, which can be advantageous if you aren’t collecting too much data.
• Datadog offers several other services in its Observability suite to pair with its APM, including a very mature Cloud Infrastructure Monitoring product which is also its first product ever in the market.
• New Relic’s anomaly detection for application logs is relatively immature.

1. "Gotchas"
2. Feature comparison
3. Integration with other services
4. Compliance concerns
5. Helpful links

• New Relic’s dashboard query language looks useful but lacks critical functions like multiple data sets or advanced calculations.
• Datadog’s drawdown-style deal structures for its larger clients require extensive usage planning and forecasting.
• Datadog is actually 17 different products which include 11 different pricing models so it can be hard for you to know in advance how much you are going to pay for what.

Product Information

• New Relic APM Product Page
• Datadog APM Product Page

Pricing Pages

• New Relic Pricing Page
• Datadog APM and Continuous Profiler Pricing Page

Louis-Victor Jadavji (or "LV") is a recognized leader in the cloud services industry. He's helped 50+ digital native companies like ModusBox, Later, and NS1 choose the right cloud stack for their applications. His work has been featured in Forbes (30 Under 30 All-Star), HuffPost, The New York Times, The Globe and Mail, and Inc. Magazine.