Dynatrace vs. Datadog Comparison

Who should you choose and why?

✋ Most important consideration

• Although both products are market leaders suitable for the enterprise, Dynatrace is better for complex hybrid environments whereas Datadog is better for cloud-native.

🤔 Strongly consider Dynatrace over Datadog if

• You have a complex IT environment potentially spanning on premise mainframes, mid-range systems like AIX servers, a VMware vSphere estate, and clouds, and you want a solution that can cope with transactions and applications that span this complex infrastructure.
• You want a well-integrated solution that can provide effective root cause analysis across very complex application and infrastructure architectures.
• You want to leverage AI better when incidents occur to identify root causes and even allow the service to resolve incidents and generate post-mortems automatically.
• You value vendors that understand how large enterprises buy infrastructure software and use it, and that has the enterprise sales and support processes to match.
• You’re a government agency with a FedRAMP certification requirement greater than Low Impact.

🤔 Strongly consider Datadog over Dynatrace if

• If you need a SaaS rather than on-premise installation.
• You run the cloud team at your company and you wanted to get started quickly with something that monitors your cloud infrastructure.
• You want to be able to grow the functionality (and the cost) of your Observability solution over time as your needs dictate.
• You are sensitive to cost and expect to use a large number of hosts of a reasonable size (16GB+). DataDog is almost always cheaper than Dynatrace, and the latter also tends to charge the same for development and staging environments.
• You want to work with many integrations/connectors and give your developers optionality (especially in the future) in terms of ready-made integrations.

📝Other Notes

• Relative to Dynatrace, Datadog has much better support for middleware.
• These two vendors (Datadog and Dynatrace) are the functionality and market leaders in the APM and Observability spaces. However they have very different ways of going to market, and the products are not the same, so your experience as a customer will be different depending upon which vendor you choose.

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

• Dynatrace’s list pricing is based upon the amount of memory that is in the monitored servers. The quoted pricing assumes 8 GB of RAM per server, which is low by many standards – which means that your actual starting point could be considerably higher.
• 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

• Datadog APM Product Page
• Dynatrace APM Product Page

Pricing Pages

• Datadog APM and Continuous Profiler Pricing Page
• Dynatrace 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.