Datadog vs Checkly
A detailed comparison to help you choose between Datadog and Checkly.
Quick Verdict
4.0/5
Datadog
0 reviews
4.1/5
Checkly
0 reviews
Checkly is rated higher (4.1 vs 4.0). Datadog is the leading enterprise observability platform. Infrastructure monitoring, APM, log management, synthetic monitoring, and security monitoring in one platform. 600+ integrations. Checkly enables monitoring as code using Playwright for E2E browser checks and HTTP API checks. Define checks alongside your code in TypeScript. Global check locations.
Datadog Enterprise monitoring — infrastructure, APM, logs | Checkly Monitoring as code with Playwright and API checks | |
|---|---|---|
| Overview | ||
| Rating | 4.0 (0 reviews) | 4.1 (0 reviews)✓ |
| Pricing model | freemium | freemium |
| Starting price | Free tier available | Free tier available |
| Best for | Scaling engineering organisations running microservices that need full-stack correlation and can fund it, plus regulated teams needing FedRAMP High or EU/German data residency. | Engineering teams who want to define synthetic and API monitoring tests as code in their repository and run them from global locations |
| Features | ||
| IPv6 | ||
| DDoS protection | ||
| Automated backups | ||
| Snapshots | ||
| Managed option | ||
| Bare metal | ||
| GPU available | ||
| S3-compatible | ||
| Hourly billing | ||
| Free tier | ||
| Tags | ||
| Tags | free tierapi accessteam featuressso | free tieropen sourceapi access |
| Visit Datadog → | Visit Checkly → | |
Datadog
Pros
- + Deepest product breadth in observability: infrastructure, APM, logs, synthetics, RUM, security on one agent and one platform
- + List pricing is public — $15/host/mo Infrastructure Pro, $31/host APM bundled — unusual for this market
- + Strong correlation workflow: traces linked to logs, metrics and deploy events shortens incident debugging
- + Regional data residency choice with fully isolated sites in the US, Germany, UK, Japan and Australia
- + Mature alerting, dashboards and docs, with 600-plus integrations across the stack
Cons
- - Costs compound fast at scale — logs, indexed spans and custom-metric overage routinely break budgets
- - Complex multi-meter billing makes forecasting harder than the per-host headline suggests
- - Free tier is evaluation-grade only: 5 hosts, one day of retention
- - Product sprawl multiplies SKUs and contract surface area
- - Site choice at sign-up is effectively permanent — migration between regions is a rebuild
Checkly
Pros
- + True monitoring as code: TypeScript + Playwright checks versioned in your repo and deployed via CLI
- + Useful free Hobby tier and clear published plan pricing
- + 22 global check locations plus private locations for internal services on Team+
- + Full check types (HTTP, TCP, DNS, ICMP, SSL/TLS, gRPC, traceroute, heartbeat) with rich alerting and status pages
- + Local test mode in CI catches broken checks before deploy; SOC 2 since 2022
Cons
- - Usage-based billing scales with frequency x locations x checks — overage at $4 per 1,000 runs adds up
- - Developer-only tool: no point-and-click path for non-technical teams
- - Synthetic monitoring only — not a replacement for APM, logs, or metrics platforms
- - No public uptime SLA for the platform itself; best features (1-second checks, parallel scheduling) gated to Enterprise
Stay in the loop
Get weekly updates on the best new hosting and infrastructure providers, deals, and comparisons.
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.