Quick Summary

In this Datadog vs New Relic comparison, we explore features, pricing, and performance to help you decide which monitoring tool fits your application best. Datadog stands out for its broad infrastructure and security monitoring, while New Relic shines with deep application performance insights. Discover how each tool performs and explore a powerful alternative offering built-in status pages and real-time updates.

Not Sure Which Is More Suited for Your Team: Datadog or New Relic?

Modern applications with microservices, containers, and dynamic infrastructure require more than basic monitoring. Datadog and New Relic both offer full-stack visibility, but their approaches, strengths, and suitability for your team vary.

In this Instatus article, we’ll explore the key differences between Datadog and New Relic, compare their core features and pricing models, and provide a clear framework to help you determine which tool is the best fit for your application performance monitoring needs.

But first…

Why Listen to Us?

At Instatus, we help thousands of SaaS and DevOps brands, including Railway, Todoist, and Manychat, keep their applications reliable with real-time monitoring and status updates that keep customers informed. 

With hands-on experience supporting these real-world applications, we know which features and monitoring strategies truly matter. That’s why we can offer an unbiased comparison of Datadog and New Relic to help you pick the tool that fits your team. 

Datadog vs New Relic: Quick Comparison

Summary: Datadog is best for comprehensive security and infrastructure monitoring, while New Relic shines at application performance monitoring and improving developer experience. 

What Is Datadog?

Datadog is a cloud-based, SaaS platform that helps you monitor your applications in real-time, providing insight into performance, errors, and user experience. Beyond applications, it also tracks infrastructure, logs, networks, and security, all in one place. 

This helps teams quickly identify issues, enhance app performance, and maintain reliability. Datadog is generally used by enterprises running large-scale, cloud-native applications.

Key Features

• Application Performance Monitoring (APM): Gain real-time insights into your application’s performance, user experience, and code-level behavior. Track errors, latency, and request traces to spot and resolve issues quickly.
• Infrastructure Monitoring: Monitor the servers, containers, databases, and cloud services that support your apps. Custom dashboards and automatic anomaly detection help detect issues early.
• Log Management: Collect, analyze, and correlate logs from multiple sources to troubleshoot errors and maintain compliance. Logs integrate seamlessly with APM and alerts for faster incident resolution.
• Security Monitoring: Protect your apps and infrastructure with real-time threat detection, compliance checks, and security analytics.
• Real-Time Alerts: Receive instant notifications via multiple channels when issues occur, enabling faster responses and minimal downtime.
• Integration Ecosystem: Connect with a wide range of built-in integrations, including AWS, Azure, and Kubernetes, for expanded monitoring and streamlined workflows.

Pricing

• Infrastructure Monitoring: Starts at $18/host/month (or $15/host/month with annual billing).
• Application Performance Monitoring (APM): Starts at $36/host/month (or $31/host/month with annual billing). 

Other features like log management, real user monitoring (RUM), and synthetic tests are priced based on usage, such as per GB ingested or per test run.

Pros

• Provides comprehensive visibility across applications, infrastructure, logs, and security.
• Delivers immediate data on application performance and system health for swift issue detection.
• Allows users to tailor dashboards to specific needs, enhancing monitoring efficiency.
• Supports several integrations, facilitating smooth connections with various tools and platforms.
• Offers robust security features, including threat detection and compliance checks.

Cons

• Pricing can be steep, especially for extended data retention. 
• New users may find the platform complex, requiring time and experience to use its features effectively. 
• Log ingestion, indexing, and retention processes can be intricate and resource-intensive.
• Datadog's highly integrated, proprietary platform can make it difficult to migrate to alternative solutions. 
• Running complex, ad-hoc queries, especially on large volumes of historical log data, can sometimes lead to slow performance and latency in returning results. 

What Is New Relic?

New Relic is a cloud-based observability platform that monitors applications, infrastructure, logs, and user experiences in real time. Previously known for its deep application performance monitoring (APM), it has since expanded into a full-stack solution covering frontend user interactions to backend systems. 

The platform collects telemetry data, or MELT (metrics, events, logs, and traces), and presents it through customizable dashboards, helping teams pinpoint, analyze, and resolve issues quickly. 

Key Features

• Application Performance Monitoring: Provides real-time performance metrics, error tracking, and code-level visibility for faster debugging. ****
• Infrastructure Monitoring: Gives a complete view of your host ecosystem to help you understand how infrastructure affects app performance. 
• Browser and Mobile Monitoring: Combines real-user experiences and synthetic testing to measure load times, crashes, and interactions across web and mobile apps. 
• Distributed Tracing: Traces how a request flows across multiple services and microservices, helping you pinpoint drags and performance issues across the entire stack. 
• AI-Powered Inisghts: Uses anomaly detection and AI-driven analysis to highlight issues and suggest proactive fixes.
• Extensive Integrations: Offers a wide range of integrations with popular DevOps tools, cloud services, and open-source standards like OpenTelemetry.

Pricing

• Free: 100 GB free original data ingestion; $0.60/GB for Data Plus; unlimited basic/core users; 1 free full-platform user.
• Standard: $0.40/GB over 100 GB (original data); $0.60/GB for Data Plus; $49/core user; 1 full-platform user at $10, additional at $99 (max 5).
• Pro: Same data costs as Standard; $49/core user; $349/year or $418.80/month per full-platform user; annual commitments available.

Enterprise: Custom pricing for data, users, and compute; includes FedRAMP Moderate & HIPAA eligibility and tailored enterprise options.

Pros

• New Relic uses AI features to find problems automatically and reduce alert overwhelm.
• The dashboards are intuitive and easy for developers to get started with, even with complex systems.
• It provides comprehensive “code-to-cloud” visibility for faster debugging and optimization.
• It unifies performance data across apps, logs, and infrastructure in a single platform.
• The free tier includes 100GB of data each month for testing and evaluation before you commit.

Cons

• The interface can be overwhelming for new users, and it has a steep learning curve.
• Advanced features, such as support and historical data retention, are limited on lower-tier plans.
• New Relic can be resource-intensive, potentially impacting the performance of the applications it is meant to monitor
• Lack of reliable support can be particularly problematic when dealing with critical performance issues
• While the platform offers a generous free tier, costs can scale significantly with data ingestion and the number of users.

Meet Instatus: A Simpler, Faster Alternative to Datadog and New Relic

Datadog and New Relic offer full-blown observability, but that level of complexity often means higher costs, steep learning curves, and extra steps just to communicate incidents with users.

We take a different, yet powerful approach. With Instatus, we combine application monitoring with built-in status pages and real-time updates so you can spot app issues quickly and communicate them instantly to your users.

Where Datadog and New Relic focus on breadth, we emphasize clarity, speed, and transparency. Instatus is lightweight and easy to use, so SaaS and DevOps teams can set up in minutes. This helps ensure faster application updates, less complexity, fewer support tickets, and happier customers.

Key Features

• Multi-Type Monitoring: Keep tabs on your app’s uptime and performance with 30-second checks on APIs, ping, TCP, and DNS from global locations, without added complexity.
• Built-In Status Pages: Turn app outages or slowdowns into clear updates with built-in public and private status pages. Incidents post automatically, so customers and teams always know what’s happening. 
• Smart Alerts and Collaboration: Send multi-channel notifications during app outages via Slack, Discord, Teams, email, SMS, or calls. On-call scheduling and escalation rules ensure effective incident response.
• Easy Integrations: Seamlessly connect with tools like Site24x7, Pingdom, and Datadog to unify alerts and auto-create incidents when issues occur.
• Role-Based Permissions: Control team access with granular roles like Read-only, Editor, and Owner, to manage who updates your status page and how.
• Customization and Multilingual Support: Brand status pages with custom domains, logos, and colors in line with your app’s identity. Communicate downtimes in 20+ languages to reach global users. 
• Maintenance and Incident Control: Automate app maintenance, schedule updates, notify subscribers, and manage incident visibility effortlessly.

Pricing

• Starter Plan (Free): 15 monitors with 2-minute check intervals, email alerts, up to 5 team members, 1 public status page, and support for 200 subscribers.
• Pro Plan (from $20/month): 50 monitors with 30-second intervals, email and SMS alerts, up to 25 team members, 1 custom domain, and 5,000 subscribers.
• Business Plan (from $300/month): 1,000 monitors, 30-second intervals, SMS and phone call alerts, SAML SSO, all status page types, support for 25,000 subscribers, and 50 on-call members.
• Enterprise Plan (Custom pricing): Contact the Instatus team for a tailored pricing plan.

Datadog vs New Relic vs Instatus: Feature Comparison

Why Do SaaS and DevOps Teams Choose Instatus?

• Builds Customer Trust: With Instatus, teams can keep customers in the loop with real-time, automatic status page updates, no extra tools or manual work.

• Offers Predictable Costs: Instatus has simple and transparent pricing without surprise fees; just straightforward plans that scale with your needs.
• Set Up in Minutes: DevOps teams can get monitoring and status pages running right away, not after weeks of setup. This allows your team to focus on building, not configuring.
• Smarter Integrated Workflow: Instatus streamlines workflow by allowing you to monitor systems, alert teams, and update customers seamlessly with built-in automation.
• Communicate Globally: Offer multilingual support and enjoy fully branded status pages that maintain a professional image everywhere you operate.
• Essential Monitoring Focus: Skip the unused extra features enterprises force you to pay for. Instatus delivers the capabilities that matter for maintaining service reliability and customer trust.

Simplify App Monitoring and Communication with Instatus

Choosing the right monitoring tool is crucial for maintaining app performance and keeping users informed. With options like Datadog and New Relic offering complex, enterprise-grade features, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed.

At Instatus, we’ve built a lightweight yet powerful solution that combines essential monitoring with native status pages and clear, predictable pricing. From real-time incident updates to automated maintenance workflows, everything is designed to keep your team efficient and your customers confident. 

Sign up for Instatus today and see how simple, transparent monitoring can transform the way your team works.