Datadog vs. Grafana Cloud

Full visibility. Transparent pricing. Your stack, your way.

You need to understand what your systems are doing. You shouldn’t have to guess what your bill will be next month to do it. Grafana Cloud gives you everything you need - dashboards, logs, metrics, traces, alerts, and more - without locking you into an expensive black box.

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Why teams choose  Grafana Cloud over Datadog

Grafana Cloud is a fully managed observability platform used by thousands of leading organizations as an alternative to Datadog. Unlike Datadog, Grafana Cloud offers consumption-based pricing and a free forever tier, unifying metrics, logs, traces, and profiles in an AI-powered platform built on open standards.

Transparent pricing that actually makes sense

No hidden charges for custom metrics, log ingestion, or data retention
Predictable pricing tiers with volume discounts
Built-in Adaptive Telemetry tools help you optimize usage and cut unnecessary spend

“Adaptive Metrics really helps us to grow efficiently from here on out, without just blowing up our metrics and our costs. Simply put, it’s given us more control over our metrics.”
Omar Lopez
Head of Observability, SailPoint

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Your data, your control

Built on open standards: OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Loki, Tempo, and more
No proprietary agents. No lock-in.
Push and pull data on your terms. Use what you need, leave what you don’t

“Grafana provides the same code, the same agent, the same observability everywhere, which was impossible before due to cost.”
Suleyman Kutlu
Lead Cloud Operations Engineer, Actian

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Full-stack visibility in one place

Correlate logs, metrics, traces, and profiles from across your infrastructure
Unified dashboards and alerting tools reduce time-to-resolution
No need to jump between tools or tabs

“Grafana changed how our teams tell stories with data, making insights accessible from one unified view.”
Adam Wilson
Principal SRE, ComplyAdvantage

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Works with the stack you already have

Native integrations with AWS, Azure, Kubernetes, and more
Keep your current agents, exporters, and instrumentation
Bring your own data sources, visualize it all in Grafana

“Grafana was key in helping us successfully migrate off Datadog and Elastic. It integrated smoothly with our existing tools”
Neil Wilson
Director of Software Engineering, LexisNexis Risk Solutions

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Comparing Grafana Cloud vs. Datadog

Capabilities
Observe your entire stack	Comprehensive observability, from application front-ends to infrastructure.	Comprehensive observability, from application front-ends to infrastructure.
Avoid lock-in by standardizing on OpenTelemetry	Protect your investment in observability with a stack that uses open standards all the way from ingest to the UI. Migrate to OTel seamlessly with support from one of its top contributors. Get to root cause faster by seeing how your entire system connects - powered by the Knowledge Graph, which unifies OpenTelemetry and Prometheus metrics. Learn more	OTel telemetry sent to Datadog is duplicated into a proprietary data format, increasing storage cost and limiting your ability to migrate to another tool.
Optimize your observability costs	Eliminate 50% or more of your observability cost by keeping only the metrics, logs, traces, and profiles worth your attention, with Adaptive Telemetry. Learn more	Head and tail sampling for traces, selective metric tag indexing, log filtering, and cost attribution. Host and custom metrics pricing can add up quickly to a large bill.
Visualize and alert on data from anywhere	Make better decisions across your organization by exploring, visualizing, and alerting on all your data in one place without moving it, powered by Grafana Cloud’s Big Tent. Learn more	Create dashboards and alerts using telemetry stored with Datadog.

Grafana Labs: A Leader in the 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Observability Platforms

Gartner evaluated 20 vendors based on their Ability to Execute and Completeness of Vision, and Grafana Labs was positioned furthest in Completeness of Vision.

Graph showing Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Observability Platforms.

^{Gartner®, Magic Quadrant™ for Observability Platforms, By Gregg Siegfried, Matt Crossley, Padraig Byrne, Andre Bridges, Martin Caren, 7 July 2025}

^{Gartner and Magic Quadrant are a trademark of Gartner, Inc., and/or its affiliates.}

^{Gartner does not endorse any company, vendor, product or service depicted in its publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s business and technology insights organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this publication, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.}

^{This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from Grafana Labs.}