Based on 150 reviews and ratings
New Relic
Based on 251 reviews and ratings
Highlights
Datadog and New Relic both provide businesses with application monitoring tools to gauge performance and troubleshoot performance issues. Datadog is an IT infrastructure monitoring tool that gives IT and DevOps teams insight into their hardware and software stacks. New Relic is an application performance monitoring tool that offers detailed performance analytics for desktop, web, and mobile applications. Since Datadog is aimed at monitoring infrastructure at scale, it’s used primarily by mid-sized companies and large enterprises. New Relic, on the other hand, is used by businesses of all sizes, likely because its pricing tiers and functionality are relevant to a wide variety of team sizes and applications.
Features
While Datadog and New Relic both provide businesses with key information about their applications or infrastructure, they have a few unique features that set them apart from each other.
Datadog has a streamlined user interface that provides a centralized location for performance monitoring, alert management, and data analysis. Additionally, Datadog supports many community-built APIs and extensions, which are freely accessible to users of the platform. These extensions can help newcomers integrate Datadog into their existing IT infrastructure. Recent additions to the Datadog platform include a mobile app, a new UI for incident management, and out-of-the-box dashboards for investigating and analyzing infrastructure security.
New Relic is generally simple to install and implement, requiring no command-line scripting for Windows and Mac users. New Relic also includes strong data security features that ensure applications are as protected as possible from data breaches, which is particularly important for businesses monitoring applications with sensitive data. New Relic provides a wide variety of community resources for learning the application, helping users train themselves and troubleshoot issues without needing to contact support. Recently, New Relic overhauled their error dashboard, collecting stack traces and error metrics into a single overview for analysis and resolution. They’ve also added one-click permalinks for dashboards and curated views to help teams quickly share insights and analyses.
Limitations
Though Datadog and New Relic both monitor applications well, they do have a few limitations that are important to consider.
Datadog has a well-designed UI, but can be challenging for new users due to the sheer magnitude of options and data offered by the platform. Datadog can also be difficult to install, requiring command-line scripting on Windows and Mac environments, which can be a problem for businesses without technical staff. Although Datadog offers security measures, it scores worse than New Relic with most security analysts. Businesses looking for high-security monitoring may prefer New Relic.
New Relic offers simple installation and community learning resources, but its users may struggle with its interface. Additionally, while New Relic does offer many APIs, it does not support community development in the same way Datadog does. Some users may find that New Relic is missing an API they require, and will have to either develop the extension on their own or explore other options.
Pricing
Datadog offers several per-month pricing models designed to adapt to different data requirements and infrastructure scales. Their price models include per-host pricing, pricing per million events, and pricing per GB of analyzed log files. For more details on available plans and pricing, refer to the Datadog pricing page.
Similarly, New Relic offers multiple service packages with varying pricing structures. Their core offering, the Full-Stack Observability package, includes infrastructure monitoring, APM, and other services. This package is free for the first user at the Standard tier and $99 per additional user per month. For information on pricing for the Pro and Enterprise tier, as well as pricing information for their telemetry data and machine-learning services, refer to the New Relic pricing page.
Provided by the TrustRadius Research Team
Published on June 5, 2020
Attribute Ratings
- Datadog is rated higher in 3 areas: Likelihood to Recommend, Usability, Support Rating
Likelihood to Recommend

Datadog

New Relic
Likelihood to Renew

Datadog

New Relic
Usability

Datadog

New Relic
Availability

Datadog

New Relic
Performance

Datadog

New Relic
Support Rating

Datadog

New Relic
Implementation Rating

Datadog

New Relic
Product Scalability

Datadog

New Relic
Likelihood to Recommend
Datadog

New Relic

Pros
Datadog
- APIs, the ability to interact with the data we pull into data dog is key. We port the information over to Servicenow, so the ability to pull everything into DataDog, then Servicenow, is a key component of our success here at Wayfair.
- Simple Interface - clean, useful, effective. Allows users to use DataDog for one reason, get work done.
- Lightweight agent on hosts
New Relic
- Monitor traffic rates and server usage on real time
- Helps engineers to dive deep into an issue and guides them to the root cause
- Provides high-level system health status of different components (ie. Server capacity, RPM, page load time, error rate..)
- Near real time reporting
- Links with deployment so easy to understand if an issue has occurred after a particular release
Cons
Datadog
- User interface could be improved in some areas, looking for host information and the agent install link takes a bit of time.
- Configuration of the agent is generally done via a config file which is a pro and a con. It would be nice to have some UI to configure various agent options.
- Billing isn't entirely straightforward, they could use more reports to figure out the source of your monthly costs.
New Relic
- It would be helpful if use cases for particularly a Windows installation, were provided to help determine which set of configuration files would be the one a group would want to control. I.e. potentially with a department trying to do DevOps, it's difficult to determine which team needs to have responsibility for what at times. The reason I mention this, is New Relic seems to in many ways be a tool that's useful for DevOps-related processes and staff.
- On the main New Relic One site, sometimes a refresh option is available for new features. It would be helpful to see what the new features are in advance before trying this out. Particularly if doing a demo or a working season with another team.
- I'm not aware of a page or specific site which describes/summarizes all of the different NR Products and their features.
- Sometimes it's tricky to determine which product to use to accomplish a task.
Pricing Details
Datadog
General
Free Trial
Free/Freemium Version
—Premium Consulting/Integration Services
—Entry-level set up fee?
Starting Price
Datadog Editions & Modules
On-premise Edition
Infrastructure | $15.001 |
---|---|
Log Management | $1.272 |
APM | $31.003 |
- Per Host Per Month
- Per Million Log Events
- Per Host Per Month
SaaS Edition
Free | $01 |
---|---|
Standard | $15/host2 |
Enterprise | Custom3 |
- Up to 5 hosts
- Up to 500 hosts
- 500+ hosts
Additional Pricing Details
—New Relic
General
Free Trial
—Free/Freemium Version
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
—Entry-level set up fee?
Starting Price
New Relic Editions & Modules
Edition
Standard | $991 |
---|---|
Pro | Contact sales team |
Enterprise | Contact sales team |
Telemetry Data Platform | 0.253 |
Incident Intelligence | 0.504 |
Free (Forever) | $05 |
- per month per full user (after first free full user - unlimited free basic users)
- none
- per month per extra GB data ingest (after first free 100GB per month)
- per month per event (after first 1000 free events per month)
- No credit card required; 100 GB free ingest per month, 1 free full user + unlimited basic users, 8 days retention, 100 Synthetics Checks
Additional Pricing Details
—Likelihood to Renew
Datadog
New Relic

Usability
Datadog

New Relic

Reliability and Availability
Datadog
New Relic
Performance
Datadog
New Relic
Support Rating
Datadog

New Relic
Implementation Rating
Datadog
New Relic
Alternatives Considered
Datadog

New Relic

Scalability
Datadog
New Relic
Return on Investment
Datadog
- One of our critical production databases went down a couple of weeks back. Just because we had the Datadog monitoring enabled for that database, Datadog sent the alerts to PagerDuty and we were instantly notified via pager and email alert. We could act right away and bring up the database within a few mins.
- Ability to create custom screenboards have allowed us to track the critical and warning alerts in front of our eyes all the time
New Relic
- Gives us great visibility into what our services are doing at all times.
- Alerts us quickly when there is a problem so we can address it with alacrity.
- Gives us extremely customizable options in regards to how we want to track, store, and materialize our data.
