Datadog vs. New Relic: Which Is Right for Your Team?

Your monitoring stack is only as good as the team response it triggers. Picking the wrong observability platform means either paying for features you'll never touch or scrambling to bolt on capabilities six months later.

Datadog and New Relic both sit in Gartner's Leader quadrant, but they solve different problems for different teams. Datadog consolidates infrastructure, APM, and security into one platform. New Relic goes deep on application performance with more predictable pricing.

Here's how they compare on features, pricing, and where each one fits your IT operations stack.

Datadog vs. New Relic at a glance

Both platforms are Gartner Magic Quadrant Leaders offering enterprise-grade observability with strong automation capabilities.

Overview of Datadog

Datadog is a unified observability platform that consolidates infrastructure monitoring, APM, log management, and cloud security into a single solution. The platform processes more than one hundred trillion events per day and maintains Leader status in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Observability Platforms. Built for cloud-native environments, Datadog eliminates tool sprawl by providing comprehensive visibility across hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructures.

Key Features:

• Real-time infrastructure monitoring across hosts, containers, and cloud services
• Application Performance Monitoring with distributed tracing
• Unified log management with correlation across metrics and traces
• Cloud security monitoring and threat detection
• AI-powered anomaly detection and incident correlation
• Customizable dashboards with real-time visualization
• 1,000+ built-in integrations across cloud platforms and business tools
• Advanced alerting with machine learning-powered predictions

Ideal for: Mid-market to enterprise organizations with mature DevOps practices operating cloud-native infrastructure requiring tool consolidation and integrated security monitoring.

Overview of New Relic

New Relic is a comprehensive observability platform recognized as a Leader in both Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Observability Platforms and Digital Experience Monitoring. The platform provides unified telemetry data management across metrics, events, logs, and traces (MELT) with strong application performance monitoring capabilities. New Relic's consumption-based pricing model and perpetual free tier make it accessible for teams of varying sizes while supporting enterprise-scale deployments.

Key Features:

• Application Performance Monitoring with automatic instrumentation
• Real User Monitoring with second-by-second granularity
• Applied Intelligence with AI-powered incident correlation
• Distributed tracing with advanced sampling options
• Multi-cloud infrastructure monitoring across AWS, Azure, and GCP
• Unified data platform (NRDB) with NRQL query language
• ServiceNow and Jira Service Management integrations
• Agentic AI integrations for cross-functional visibility

Ideal for: Development teams and SRE organizations prioritizing application performance monitoring with digital experience capabilities, especially those requiring cross-functional collaboration between engineering and business teams.

Side-by-Side Feature Comparison

When to Choose Datadog vs. New Relic

Choose Datadog if you need:

• Integrated cloud security monitoring and threat detection capabilities
• Superior Kubernetes and container monitoring for cloud-native architectures
• Tool consolidation strategy with comprehensive infrastructure and application visibility
• Flexible pricing for high-host-count environments with moderate telemetry volumes
• Advanced AIOps with highest Forrester scores across 11 evaluation categories

Choose New Relic if you value:

• Application-centric monitoring with 13-year sustained market leadership validation
• Dual analyst recognition across observability and digital experience monitoring
• Consumption-based pricing that can optimize costs for specific deployment patterns
• Strong ServiceNow and Jira Service Management workflow integration
• Perpetual free tier for proof-of-concept testing and small team adoption
• Cross-functional visibility surfacing technical insights to business stakeholders

Picking the Right Observability Platform for Your Team

Datadog wins on unified infrastructure monitoring with built-in security. New Relic wins on application-centric depth with more predictable pricing. Your pick depends on where your biggest visibility gaps are.

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