Datadog vs New Relic: What are the differences?
Datadog: Unify logs, metrics, and traces from across your distributed infrastructure. Datadog is the leading service for cloud-scale monitoring. It is used by IT, operations, and development teams who build and operate applications that run on dynamic or hybrid cloud infrastructure. Start monitoring in minutes with Datadog!; New Relic: SaaS Application Performance Management for Ruby, PHP, .Net, Java, Python, and Node.js Apps. New Relic is the all-in-one web application performance tool that lets you see performance from the end user experience, through servers, and down to the line of application code.
Datadog and New Relic can be categorized as "Performance Monitoring" tools.
Some of the features offered by Datadog are:
- 14-day Free Trial for an unlimited number of hosts
- 200+ turn-key integrations for data aggregation
- Clean graphs of StatsD and other integrations
On the other hand, New Relic provides the following key features:
- Performance Data Retention
- Real-User Response Time, Throughput, & Breakdown by Layer
- App Response Time, Throughput, & Breakdown by Component
"Monitoring for many apps (databases, web servers, etc)", "Easy setup" and "Powerful ui" are the key factors why developers consider Datadog; whereas "Easy setup", "Really powerful" and "Awesome visualization" are the primary reasons why New Relic is favored.
According to the StackShare community, New Relic has a broader approval, being mentioned in 3142 company stacks & 575 developers stacks; compared to Datadog, which is listed in 540 company stacks and 223 developer stacks.
I haven't heard much about Datadog until about a year ago. Ironically, the NewRelic sales person who I had a series of trainings with was trash talking about Datadog a lot. That drew my attention to Datadog and I gave it a try at another client project where we needed log handling, dashboards and alerting.
In 2019, Datadog was already offering log management and from that perspective, it was ahead of NewRelic. Other than that, from my perspective, the two tools are offering a very-very similar set of tools. Therefore I wouldn't say there's a significant difference between the two, the decision is likely a matter of taste. The pricing is also very similar.
The reasons why we chose Datadog over NewRelic were:
- The presence of log handling feature (since then, logging is GA at NewRelic as well since falls 2019).
- The setup was easier even though I already had experience with NewRelic, including participation in NewRelic trainings.
- The UI of Datadog is more compact and my experience is smoother.
- The NewRelic UI is very fragmented and New Relic One is just increasing this experience for me.
- The log feature of Datadog is very well designed, I find very useful the tagging logs with services. The log filtering is also very awesome.
Bottom line is that both tools are great and it makes sense to discover both and making the decision based on your use case. In our case, Datadog was the clear winner due to its UI, ease of setup and the awesome logging and alerting features.
I chose Datadog APM because the much better APM insights it provides (flamegraph, percentiles by default).
The drawbacks of this decision are we had to move our production monitoring to TimescaleDB + Telegraf instead of NR Insight
NewRelic is definitely easier when starting out. Agent is only a lib and doesn't require a daemon
Pros of Datadog
- Easy setup103
- Cost2
Pros of New Relic
- Easy setup415
- Ease of use194
- Great ui152
- Free tier107
- Free1