Datadog vs New Relic Comparison & Top Alternative

Datadog vs New Relic - Overview

Datadog and New Relic are both robust Application Performance Monitoring (APM) platforms, each with its unique focus. Datadog shines in cloud security and monitoring, offering a broad view of your infrastructure, be it on-premises, cloud-based, or hybrid, by unifying logs, metrics, and traces. On the other hand, New Relic stands out with its robust APM capabilities alongside Mobile, Synthetics, and Browser monitoring tools, providing a cloud-based observability platform for end-to-end visibility into complex software environments.

As you delve into the key features, you'll notice Datadog emphasizes log management, application performance monitoring, security, and network monitoring, supporting multiple cloud providers. Contrastingly, New Relic's forte lies in application performance monitoring, distributed tracing, error analytics, and infrastructure monitoring. These distinctive feature sets cater to different monitoring and analytical needs, guiding you to choose based on your organization's primary requirements.

Your experience with installation and ease of use may also influence your choice. Datadog provides a straightforward installation process with well-documented guides, ready for use post-installation without the need for additional plugins. Conversely, New Relic, while user-friendly, requires the installation of agents on the systems you aim to monitor. It offers a free-forever, full-access account for a thorough test drive, with a fully automated installation script aiding in a smooth deployment process.

Lastly, your preference for dashboards, reporting, and incident management might sway your decision. Datadog offers customizable dashboards and real-time reporting, aiding in a detailed investigation of specific metrics. New Relic, however, provides an intuitive dashboard with a unique feature called Insights for deep analysis, and an advanced, AI-powered alerting system for incident response. Both platforms support a variety of third-party integrations, yet New Relic has a slight edge with a freemium plan, which might appeal to you if budget is a concern.

What is Datadog?

Datadog is an observability platform that helps engineering and operations teams monitor their applications, services, and infrastructure.

It aggregates data from servers, databases, applications, tools, networks, containers, and more in real-time to give you a complete view of the system. With features like dashboards, alerting systems, APIs, and integrations, Datadog helps you to analyze and troubleshoot performance issues quickly. 

This tool also allows IT teams manage cloud-based systems and IT infrastructure while providing insights into your systems' health. 

Key features

• Mobile Real User Monitoring (RUM): Track and analyze user behavior on your mobile app in real-time.

• Distributed Tracing: Easily trace requests from start to finish across all services, databases, and components within your system.

• Event Correlation: Correlate events across systems to quickly uncover the root causes of issues.

• Log Management: Combine logs, metrics, and traces for rich data analysis context—access centralized logs for complete visibility across your infrastructure.

Other essential features include;

• Application Performance Monitoring

• Infrastructure Performance Monitoring

• Automated Alerting

• Application Vulnerability Management

• Session Replay

• Dashboards

Pricing

Datadog has distinct plans for each of its 20 products—and there’s a ton of variation.

For example, Application Performance Monitoring starts at $31/month, while Network Performance Monitoring starts at $5/host/month. Plans are almost always usage-based, which makes it easy to choose the right plan based on your needs.

Pros and cons

Pros

• A straightforward and well-documented installation process 

• Data correlation from different sources

• Customizable dashboards

• Excellent reporting

Cons

• Confusing pricing and bundling

• Customer support could use improvement 

What is New Relic?

New Relic is a cloud-based observability platform (like Datadog) that provides insight into software applications' performance and health.

It combines mobile, browser, application, infrastructure, and website monitoring with AI-driven analytics and alerting. It’s designed to provide visibility into the performance of your applications, enabling you to troubleshoot issues quickly and optimize them for better performance.

Key features

• Mobile Monitoring: Monitor mobile applications with real-time analytics, user activity monitoring, and performance tracking.

• AI Insights: Chat with your data through New Relic’s Grok chatbot to get dashboard-level insights and quickly respond to customer feedback.

• Application Performance Management (APM): Gain insights into application performance and health with real-time visibility into transactions, traces, errors, and more.

Other relevant New Relic features include;

• Full-Stack Monitoring

• Application Security Management

• Log Management

• Infrastructure Monitoring

• Session Replay (beta)

Pricing

Contact sales for a quote.

Pros and Cons

Pros:

• Resource library

• Easy visibility of performance following a fix

• 470 + integrations

Cons:

• Pricing information is not available on their website

Best alternative to Datadog and New Relic - UXCam

UXCam is an all-in-one mobile analytics platform that leads product teams to the “whys” behind user behavior.

UXCam offers a range of user and application monitoring tools as part of that mission. On the user-facing side, features like heatmaps, session replays, and event logs help product teams identify UX issues and address them. On the application-facing side, issue analytics and frustration signals help product teams identify and prioritize their application-level issues.

All issues identified are automatically linked to the relevant user sessions, meaning product teams can fully understand exactly what happened.

Key features

• Session Replays: Replay user sessions to understand how users interact with your mobile app.

• Heatmaps: Get visual insights into how users use your app by seeing where they click and scroll.

• Event Logs: Track the journey through your mobile application for further insight into user behavior.

• Issue Analytics: Identify application-level issues in real-time and prioritize them based on their relative impact.

• Dashboards: Quickly monitor the performance of your mobile app with customizable dashboards.

Unique users that fail to sign up, unique users who experience a UI freeze, previous screens from Cart Activity, top next screens from Cart Activity.

• Frustration Signals: Automatically detect frustration and get alerted through the dashboard or an email notification.

Other UXCam features include:

• Smart events

• Retention analytics

• Funnels

• User Journey Mapping

• Advanced Segmentation

• Custom Events & Properties

• Slack & Teams Alerts

• Collaboration Tools

Pricing

UXCam has a free plan that supports unlimited users and up to 3,000 monthly sessions.

Growth and Enterprise are custom plans—we’ll help you determine the best pricing to fit your needs. All plans feature a 14-day free trial.

Pros and cons

Pros

• Mobile-first platform

• Designed with non-technical teams in mind

• Lightweight SDK that won’t slow app performance

• 14-day free trial

Cons

• Pricing information is not available online

Datadog vs. New Relic vs. UXCam: Feature comparison

Conclusion

Datadog and New Relic are leaders in infrastructure observability with extensive features for deep technical analysis. Although they offer some features to support understanding user front-end behavior, like session replays, their products mainly focus on observing the platform instead of the people using it.

At UXCam, our offerings will help you deliver experiences that keep users returning. We support teams in maintaining application stability and user satisfaction as they gain value using an app that gets them.

Find out how we can help by requesting a free demo.

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