Datadog vs New Relic

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.