Datadog vs Grafana Cloud
Datadog and Grafana Cloud are both uptime & monitoring tools. Datadog is aimed at enterprise and developers, while Grafana Cloud is aimed at developers and enterprise. Datadog costs less, from $18/mo versus $19/mo for Grafana Cloud. Both have a free plan.
Cloud monitoring and security platform
Open-source observability dashboards
| Pricing | Freemium · $18 | Freemium · $19 |
| Starting price | $18/mo | $19/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | 14 days | 14 days |
| Built for | Enterprise, Developers | Developers, Enterprise |
| Platforms | web | web |
| Country | US · 2010 | US · 2014 |
| 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 Grafana Cloud if
Engineering teams comfortable with open-source observability who want control and lower cost.
- Open source with no lock-in
- Generous free cloud tier
- Visualizes almost any data source
Look elsewhere if: Teams wanting turnkey, fully integrated APM (Datadog, New Relic).
Datadog vs Grafana Cloud 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
Grafana Cloud
- Free$010k metrics series, 50 GB logs/traces, 3 users, 14-day retention
- Pro$19/moPlatform fee plus usage; 3 users included, then $8/user
- Enterprise$25,000/yrMinimum annual spend commit; custom 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
Grafana Cloud · Key features
- Dashboards over 150+ data sources
- Prometheus-compatible metrics (Mimir)
- Logs with Loki and traces with Tempo
- Alerting, on-call and incident response
- k6 load testing and synthetic monitoring
- Self-hosted open source or managed cloud
Cons
- More setup than Datadog
- Query languages to learn (PromQL, LogQL)
- Fragmented product surface
Datadog vs Grafana Cloud: FAQ
Which is cheaper, Datadog or Grafana Cloud?
Datadog starts at $18/mo and Grafana Cloud at $19/mo. Both prices are checked on the vendors' own pricing pages.
Do Datadog and Grafana Cloud have a free plan?
Yes, both Datadog and Grafana Cloud have a free plan; paid plans add more usage and features.