Datadog Alternative: Lower Costs. No Tradeoffs.
One predictable ingestion-based price. No per-host fees, no custom metric charges, no surprise add-ons.
Free Datadog Cost Assessment
See where you can reduce observability spend, improve cost predictability, and compare your current setup with OpenObserve.
Datadog: Lack of Predictability and Transparency
Engineering teams are leaving Datadog as bills fluctuate 15–35% month over month and observability becomes a cost center.
Is your bill out of control?
Datadog pricing can become difficult to predict as your environment grows, with costs influenced by tags, services, hosts, and data structure. OpenObserve simplifies pricing with one model: pay for the data you ingest.
Engineering becomes a cost center
Datadog costs can turn observability into a budget concern as systems scale. OpenObserve helps teams keep costs predictable, so engineering can focus on reliability instead of defending spend.
Missing data during incidents
Datadog cost controls can force tradeoffs on telemetry coverage and retention. OpenObserve unifies metrics, logs, traces, RUM, and other telemetry with included retention, giving teams the context they need during incidents.
Datadog vs OpenObserve
Side-by-side comparison across logs, metrics, traces, features, and pricing
| Feature | Datadog | OpenObserve |
|---|---|---|
| Logs | ✓ | ✓ |
| Metrics | ✓ | ✓ |
| Traces | ✓ | ✓ |
| Open Source | ✗ | ✓ |
| Dashboards | ✓ | ✓ |
| Alerts | ✓ | ✓ |
| Pipelines | ✓ | ✓ |
| OpenTelemetry Native | Partial | ✓ Full |
| Per-Host Pricing | $15-27/host/mo | $0 |
| Custom Metrics | $0.05/metric | Unlimited, included |
| Self-Hosted Option | ✗ | ✓ |
| Bring Your Own Storage | ✗ | Use S3, GCS, Azure Blob, or MinIO |
| IAM & SSO | Enterprise tier only | Included in Enterprise/Cloud with no premium cost |
"OpenObserve has proven to be a reliable and cost-effective solution built to address real-world challenges."
Women’s fashion retailer with 2,500+ employees, nationwide stores, and eCommerce.
90% cost reduction
Datadog: 112 auto-generated metrics, billed separately (~$217/month in test) vs OpenObserve: all metrics $0.30/GB.
One platform for all signals
Replaced Datadog, New Relic, and Prometheus/Grafana with a single system.
Unlimited monitoring with long-term retention
No limits on custom metrics and data retention, enabling year-over-year visibility for critical analytics.
Migrating is as easy as 1, 2, 3
Start where you are. No rip-and-replace. OpenTelemetry ready.
Point your OTel collector
Change the endpoint in your existing OpenTelemetry configuration. This takes about 2 minutes.
Import dashboards and set alerts
Recreate dashboards and configure alerts. SQL queries and built-in integrations make it straightforward.
Run both in parallel
Keep Datadog running while during transition. Cut over when you are ready.