Datadog vs PagerDuty
Datadog and PagerDuty are both uptime & monitoring tools. Datadog is aimed at enterprise and developers, while PagerDuty is aimed at developers and enterprise. Datadog costs less, from $18/mo versus $25/mo for PagerDuty. Both have a free plan.
Cloud monitoring and security platform
On-call scheduling, alerting and incident response for ops teams
| Pricing | Freemium · $18 | Freemium · $25 |
| Starting price | $18/mo | $25/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | 14 days | 14 days |
| Built for | Enterprise, Developers | Developers, Enterprise, Small businesses |
| Platforms | web | web, ios, android |
| Country | US · 2010 | US · 2009 |
| 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 PagerDuty if
Engineering and IT operations teams that run critical production services and need proven on-call paging and incident coordination.
- Highly reliable paging, the industry reference for on-call
- Largest integration catalogue among incident tools
- Free plan is enough for very small teams
Look elsewhere if: Small teams wanting cheap, bundled uptime monitoring and paging (Better Stack, Grafana Cloud IRM).
Datadog vs PagerDuty 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
PagerDuty
- Free$0Up to 5 users, 1 schedule, 100 SMS/phone alerts a month
- Professional$25/user/mo$21/user/mo billed annually; post-incident reviews
- Starter (Platform)$2,800/yr10 seats, 5,000 events, 1,000 AI actions; billed upfront
- Essential (Platform)$12,000/yr20 seats, 40,000 events, 4,000 AI actions
- Plus (Platform)$48,000/yr50 seats, 150,000 events, 16,000 AI actions
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
PagerDuty · Key features
- On-call schedules, overrides and multi-level escalation policies
- Alert routing, grouping and deduplication from 700+ integrations
- Push, SMS, phone and email notifications with mobile acknowledgement
- Incident channels and actions inside Slack and Microsoft Teams
- Post-incident reviews and operational analytics
- AIOps add-on for event correlation and noise reduction
Cons
- Costs rise fast with AIOps, status pages and automation add-ons
- Packaging and plan names change often, making comparisons hard
- Platform tiers require annual upfront payment
Datadog vs PagerDuty: FAQ
Which is cheaper, Datadog or PagerDuty?
Datadog starts at $18/mo and PagerDuty at $25/mo. Both prices are checked on the vendors' own pricing pages.
Do Datadog and PagerDuty have a free plan?
Yes, both Datadog and PagerDuty have a free plan; paid plans add more usage and features.
Which is better for small businesses, Datadog or PagerDuty?
PagerDuty lists small businesses as a core audience, while Datadog is aimed more at enterprise and developers.