Datadog vs Dynatrace
Datadog and Dynatrace are both uptime & monitoring tools aimed at enterprise and developers. Only Datadog has a free plan.
Cloud monitoring and security platform
AI-driven observability and app security for large cloud estates
| Pricing | Freemium · $18 | Paid |
| Starting price | $18/mo | Not published |
| Free plan | Yes | No |
| Free trial | 14 days | 15 days |
| Built for | Enterprise, Developers | Enterprise, Developers |
| Platforms | web | web |
| Country | US · 2010 | US · 2005 |
| Rating | — | — |
Choose Datadog if
Scale-ups and enterprises running complex cloud infrastructure with budget for observability.
- Broadest observability coverage in one tool
- Excellent dashboards and correlation
- 900+ integrations
Look elsewhere if: Startups and small teams (Grafana Cloud free, Better Stack, Sentry).
Choose Dynatrace if
Large enterprises running complex hybrid or Kubernetes environments that want automatic instrumentation and AI root-cause analysis.
- Automatic discovery and instrumentation save weeks of manual setup
- Root-cause analysis cuts alert noise better than threshold-based tools
- One platform covers APM, infrastructure, logs, RUM and runtime security
Look elsewhere if: Startups and small teams that need a cheap, self-serve monitoring tool (Datadog, New Relic or Grafana Cloud are easier entry points).
Datadog vs Dynatrace pricing
Datadog
- Free$0Up to 5 hosts, 1-day metric retention
- Infrastructure Pro$18/host/moOn-demand; $15 billed annually
- Infrastructure Enterprise$27/host/moOn-demand; $23 billed annually
- APM$36/host/moOn-demand; $31 billed annually with Infrastructure
- Log Management$0.10/GB ingestedIngest only; indexing billed separately
Dynatrace
- Foundation & Discovery$7/host/moBasic host health and discovery; billed per host-hour
- Infrastructure Monitoring$29/host/moHosts, processes and networks; $0.04 per host-hour
- Full-Stack Monitoring$58/8 GiB host/moAPM, tracing, code-level analysis; Kubernetes pods included
- Log Analytics$0.20/GiBIngest price; retention and queries billed separately or bundled
- Real User Monitoring$2.25/1,000 sessions$4.50 per 1,000 with Session Replay; 35-day retention
Datadog · Key features
- Infrastructure metrics and host maps
- APM, distributed tracing and continuous profiler
- Log management with pipelines and archives
- RUM, session replay and synthetic monitoring
- Security monitoring and cloud SIEM
- Incident management and Bits AI
Cons
- Expensive and complex pricing
- Costs grow with hosts and log volume
- Easy to overspend on custom metrics
Dynatrace · Key features
- OneAgent auto-instruments hosts, containers, processes and code with one install
- Smartscape topology map of live service and infrastructure dependencies
- Grail data lakehouse for logs, metrics, traces and events queried with DQL
- Causal AI that collapses alert storms into a single root-cause problem
- Real user monitoring with session replay and synthetic browser checks
- Runtime vulnerability analytics and application protection on monitored hosts
Cons
- Requires an annual spend commitment, so not suited to small teams
- Consumption pricing across many meters is hard to forecast
- DQL and the platform's breadth take real time to learn
Datadog vs Dynatrace: FAQ
Do Datadog and Dynatrace have a free plan?
Datadog has a free plan. Dynatrace has no free plan, a 15-day free trial.