OBSERVABILITY · PRICING COMPARE
Observability pricing compare
Capture-dated list prices, ranked on your actual volume. Quote-driven platforms are shown but never guessed onto the chart.
The indexed-events line is the shock: ingest-only logs are not searchable, so querying anything adds $1.06–2.50 per million events per month on top of ingestion.
Datadog's equivalent basket prices at 27.6× this total — the indexed-events line is where the multiple comes from.
| # | Platform | Ingest /mo | Retention /mo | Hosts /mo | Platform fee | Total /mo | × cheapest | Pin |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Axiom | $0.00 | incl. | — | $25.00 | $25.00 | cheapest | |
| 2 | Better Stack | $26.40 | incl. | — | $25.00 | $51.40 | 2.1× | |
| 3 | New Relic | $81.60 | incl. | — | — | $81.60 | 3.3× | |
| 4 | Dash0 | $182.40 | incl. | — | — | $182.40 | 7.3× | |
| 5 | Grafana Cloud ≈ near-tie | $114.30 | incl. | $49.99 | $19.00 | $183.29 | 7.3× | |
| 6 | Dynatrace | $60.80 | $121.60 | $290.00 | — | $472.40 | 18.9× | |
| 7 | Datadog | $30.40 | $510.00 | $150.00 | — | $690.40 | 27.6× |
Ranked strictly by price. Totals within ~$2 of the row above are badged ≈ near-tie — close enough that feature richness may be the better decider.
Ingest rates
Same rate sets that drive the ranking — bar length is linear in $/GB.
Source: price-change register below.
Where the money goes monthly totals
Ingest (blue), retention/index (amber) and host (emerald) slices stacked to the same scale — width is your bill at 10 GB/day · 30d · 10 hosts.
ingest retention/index hosts platform fee.
Price-change register
| Platform | Ingest /GB | Index /GB·mo | Per-host /mo | Δ vs prev | Who should skip |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| New Relic | $0.40 | not captured | not captured | baseline sighting | Skip if your team needs more than one full platform seat — user fees, not data, become the bill. |
| Better Stack | $0.10 | $0.05 | not captured | baseline sighting | Skip if you need deep APM/profiling — Better Stack is logs+uptime-first; pairing it with a profiler is common. |
| Datadog | $0.10 | $1.70 | $15.00 | baseline sighting | Skip unless you need its 800+ integrations under one roof — you are paying Big-3-cloud prices for logs plus a la carte everything else. |
| Axiom | $0.12 | not captured | not captured | baseline sighting | Skip if you rely on a mature alerting/ecosystem layer — Axiom wins on raw ingest economics, not breadth. |
| Dynatrace | $0.20 | not captured | $29.00 | baseline sighting | Skip for small estates — per-host monitoring fees dominate below ~50 hosts; the AI/smarts premium needs scale to amortize. |
| Grafana Cloud | $0.45 | not captured | $7.20 | baseline sighting | Skip if you want zero assembly — Grafana Cloud is the cheapest serious stack here, but someone on the team owns dashboards and Loki query tuning. |
| Dash0 | $0.60 | $0.0000 | not captured | baseline sighting | Skip if you bill by host and expect infra-metric pricing to dominate — Dash0 charges purely per data point, so chatty metrics workloads need the $0.20/M metric line modeled separately. |
Every rate carries its capture date from vendor pricing pages; Δ compares the current capture to the previous distinct one and names which rate moved (ingest / index / per-host) instead of implying every change is a hike. “baseline sighting” = first capture on record. Uncaptured rates render “not captured”, never zero; currencies stay native. Machine-readable copy: register.csv.
Crossover & retention scenarios
Deterministic modeling over the same captured rates as the calculator, pinned to its default workload: 10 GB/day ingest, 30-day retention, 10 hosts (provenance: the calculator's documented defaults). Every figure recomputes from the catalog on build — no hand-typed numbers.
Per-host vs per-GB break-evens
No crossing anywhere in the modeled range (up to 5,000,000 GB/mo): the cheapest GB-billed quote (Better Stack) undercuts every alternative across the entire domain.
| Host-billed plan | GB-billed quote | Break-even GB/mo | Cheaper below | Cheaper above | The math |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Datadog | New Relic | never | New Relic (GB) | New Relic (GB) | 150.00 + 1.7776·G = -40.00 + 0.4000·G |
| Datadog | Better Stack | never | Better Stack (GB) | Better Stack (GB) | 150.00 + 1.7776·G = 21.00 + 0.1000·G |
| Datadog | Axiom | never | Axiom (GB) | Axiom (GB) | 150.00 + 1.7776·G = -95.00 + 0.1200·G |
| Datadog | Dash0 | never | Dash0 (GB) | Dash0 (GB) | 150.00 + 1.7776·G = 0.00 + 0.6000·G |
| Grafana Cloud | New Relic | never | New Relic (GB) | New Relic (GB) | 46.49 + 0.4500·G = -40.00 + 0.4000·G |
| Grafana Cloud | Better Stack | never | Better Stack (GB) | Better Stack (GB) | 46.49 + 0.4500·G = 21.00 + 0.1000·G |
| Grafana Cloud | Axiom | never | Axiom (GB) | Axiom (GB) | 46.49 + 0.4500·G = -95.00 + 0.1200·G |
| Grafana Cloud | Dash0 | 310 | Dash0 (GB) | Grafana Cloud (host) | 46.49 + 0.4500·G = 0.00 + 0.6000·G |
| Dynatrace | New Relic | never | New Relic (GB) | New Relic (GB) | 290.00 + 0.6000·G = -40.00 + 0.4000·G |
| Dynatrace | Better Stack | never | Better Stack (GB) | Better Stack (GB) | 290.00 + 0.6000·G = 21.00 + 0.1000·G |
| Dynatrace | Axiom | never | Axiom (GB) | Axiom (GB) | 290.00 + 0.6000·G = -95.00 + 0.1200·G |
| Dynatrace | Dash0 | never | Dash0 (GB) | Dash0 (GB) | 290.00 + 0.6000·G = 0.00 + 0.6000·G |
Lines are each vendor's monthly cost c = intercept + slope × GB ingested beyond its free tier (G = GB/month); “never” = no intersection inside the modeled range, the flat-slope side wins everywhere. Free-tier kinks are handled by the aggregate grid scan above the table. Host-billed = vendors charging a per-infrastructure-host monthly fee; GB-billed = pure consumption pricing.
Retention-cost curves — indexed-log cost at fixed windows
| Platform | 15-day retention | 30-day retention | 60-day retention | 90-day retention | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Datadog | $255.00 | not published | not published | not published | 15d tier from captured index rate ($1.70/GB-mo = $1.70/1M events Pro annual); wider windows published only as a $1.06–2.50/1M range — not individually captured. |
| New Relic | not published | not published | not published | not published | 8-day retention included in the captured rate; longer windows not published. |
| Grafana Cloud | incl. | incl. | $30.00 | $60.00 | 30d included (fair-use retain ratio); overage $0.10/GB-mo from the catalog note of the 2026-08-24 capture. |
| Better Stack | incl. | incl. | $15.00 | $30.00 | Captured index rate 0.05/GB-month pro-rated beyond the 30-day included window. |
| Axiom | incl. | incl. | not published | not published | 30-day retention included in the captured rate; longer windows not published. |
| Dynatrace | $30.40 | $121.60 | $304.00 | $486.40 | 10-day retention included in the captured rate; longer windows not published. |
| Sumo Logic | not ranked | not ranked | not ranked | not ranked | Not ranked — no captured per-GB rates (see vendor notes). |
| Honeycomb | not ranked | not ranked | not ranked | not ranked | Not ranked — no captured per-GB rates (see vendor notes). |
| Sentry | not ranked | not ranked | not ranked | not ranked | Not ranked — no captured per-GB rates (see vendor notes). |
| Dash0 | incl. | incl. | not published | not published | 30-day retention included in the captured rate; longer windows not published. |
| Chronosphere | not ranked | not ranked | not ranked | not ranked | Not ranked — no captured per-GB rates (see vendor notes). |
| Last9 | not ranked | not ranked | not ranked | not ranked | Not ranked — no captured per-GB rates (see vendor notes). |
Monthly indexed-log cost at 10 GB/day ingest. “incl.” = window covered by the captured rate; “not published” = the vendor does not publish that extension tier in the fields we capture — never modeled as free. Datadog's captured index rate is specifically its 15-day Pro tier ($1.70/GB-mo ≈ $1.70/1M events); wider windows are published only as a $1.06–2.50/1M range, so they stay unpublished here rather than extrapolated flat.
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We earn 25% of net revenue for 12 months after you become a paying customer. Official terms: betterstack.com/affiliates · verified 2026-08-24
Visit Better Stack →Observability pricing FAQ
Why is Datadog so expensive?
Datadog charges separately for ingestion ($0.10/GB), log indexing ($1.06–2.50 per million events by retention window — ingest-only logs are not searchable), and infrastructure hosts ($15+/host/month). At 10 GB/day with 30-day retention and 10 hosts, list pricing adds up to roughly $690/month before any other product.
What is the cheapest Datadog alternative for logs?
At typical SMB volumes, object-storage-backed platforms like Axiom ($25/mo including 1 TB ingest) and Better Stack ($25/mo bundles with 30-day retention) price an order of magnitude below Datadog for equivalent searchable-log workloads.
Why are some platforms not ranked?
Event-priced platforms (Honeycomb, Sentry) bill per span or event rather than per GB, and quote-based platforms (Sumo Logic) publish no list rates we can capture. Forcing either onto a $/GB chart would mean inventing numbers, so they're listed under “not ranked” with the exact reason instead.
Does retention length change the ranking?
It can. Retention bills only days beyond each platform’s included window, so widening from 30 to 90 days raises indexed-log costs on vendors that charge for extension while leaving bundle-priced platforms flat. The retention-cost curves section above models exactly this at fixed windows.
Methodology
- All rates are published list prices fetched from official pricing pages; every row links its source.
- Model: ingest = GB/day × 30.4 × rate (free allowances deducted); retention bills only days beyond each platform's included window; hosts and platform fees add on top.
- Datadog's indexing is officially priced per million events; we use the standard ≈1M events ≈ 1 GB approximation and label it. We do not apply the same trick in reverse: event-priced platforms (Honeycomb, Sentry) and quote-based platforms (Sumo Logic) stay unranked.
- Excluded line items are stated per vendor — e.g. New Relic full-platform user seats ($99–349/user/mo), which can exceed the usage bill.