“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.
Datadog Alternative: Lower Costs. No Tradeoffs.
One predictable ingestion-based price. No per-host fees, no custom metric charges, no surprise add-ons.
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Get a Datadog Cost Assessment
In 30 minutes, we'll review your Datadog deployment, identify what's driving your bill, and show how OpenObserve compares.
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.
Cost out-of-control
Pricing is driven by tags, services, and data structure, not just usage. What looks like normal growth turns into unpredictable cost increases.
Engineering becomes a cost center
Datadog costs grow unpredictably as systems scale. Instead of enabling engineering, observability becomes a line item in question every quarter.
Critical data is missing
To control cost, teams sample telemetry and indexing a small portion of ingestion volume. During incidents, those gaps turn a 10-minute fix into hours of downtime during your next P0 incident.
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 |
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.
1
Point your OTel collector
Change the endpoint in your existing OpenTelemetry configuration. This takes about 2 minutes.
2
Import dashboards and set alerts
Recreate dashboards and configure alerts. SQL queries and built-in integrations make it straightforward.
3
Run both in parallel
Keep Datadog running while during transition. Cut over when you are ready.
Ready to stop overpaying for observability?
If you have less than 6 months left on your Datadog contract, switch to OpenObserve. If savings don’t match, we cover the difference (up to $100K).
