Datadog vs New Relic 2026: Per-Host vs Per-GB Pricing

Pick New Relic if your team is small and your infrastructure is large; pick Datadog if many engineers need full access and your host count is stable. The two price on opposite axes. Datadog charges per host, $15 a month for infrastructure monitoring plus $31 for APM, billed annually. New Relic charges per GB ingested, $0.40 beyond a free 100 GB a month, plus per user: $10 for the first full user on Standard and $349 a month per full user on Pro with an annual commitment.

Prices were read on 19 October 2026 on Datadog's pricing page and New Relic's pricing page, both in US dollars.

Toolradar data: of the 210 monitoring tools Toolradar tracks as of 19 October 2026, Datadog is the most cross-shopped, listed as an alternative to 128 other tools, with New Relic second at 81. Datadog also drew the most compare-page visits in the category over the last 30 days, 141, per Toolradar's monitoring statistics.

Datadog vs New Relic at a glance

Source: vendor pricing pages, read 19 October 2026.

How the two pricing models work

Datadog sells products, and each product has its own meter. Infrastructure monitoring is billed per host, where a host is any physical or virtual OS instance the agent runs on. APM is billed per host that sends traces, with 150 GB of ingested spans and 1 million indexed spans per APM host per month pooled across all APM hosts. Logs have two meters: $0.10 per GB to ingest and $1.70 per million events to index with 15-day retention, both on annual billing ($2.55 per million on demand).

That structure rewards a team that knows its fleet. If you run 20 hosts all month, the infrastructure and APM lines are predictable to the dollar. It punishes autoscaling and verbose logging: every extra instance adds a host fee, and every indexed log line adds to the events meter.

New Relic sells access and data. All telemetry, metrics, traces, logs and events, goes into one ingest meter: 100 GB free each month, then $0.40 per GB on the original data option or $0.60 on Data Plus, which adds longer retention and governance features. On top sits a user meter. Basic users are free and can view dashboards and alerts. Core users cost $49 and get logs, error tracking and IDE telemetry. Full platform users get the whole product, including APM and distributed tracing.

The full-user price depends on edition. Standard charges $10 for the first full user and $99 for each additional one, capped at five full users. Pro removes the cap at $349 per full user a month with an annual commitment, or $418.80 pay as you go. That gap between Standard and Pro is the single biggest number in this comparison.

What a 20-host team pays per month

Devshot calculation: a team of five engineers who all need full access, 20 hosts running infrastructure monitoring and APM, and 500 GB of logs a month. For Datadog the scenario indexes 20 million of those log events for 15 days; for New Relic the scenario puts total telemetry at 1,000 GB a month. Volumes are scenario inputs, prices are each vendor's printed rates.

Our arithmetic from the printed rates. New Relic data: 900 GB billed beyond the free monthly allowance at the original-data rate. Standard users: $10 plus four at $99.

New Relic Standard is the cheapest line here, and Pro is the most expensive. At five engineers, Standard costs about a quarter less than Datadog on annual billing, because 20 hosts on Datadog cost more than 900 GB on New Relic. Move the same team to Pro, which you must do for a sixth full user, and the user line alone outweighs Datadog's entire bill.

The model flips with scale in two directions. Double the hosts to 40 and Datadog's host lines double, while New Relic only pays for the extra data those hosts send. Double the engineers to 10 and Datadog's bill does not move, while New Relic Pro adds five more full-user seats at its Pro price. Model both your host count and your headcount before choosing, because those are the variables that decide this matchup. Our Datadog pricing page works through Datadog's bill at other fleet sizes.

Free tiers: which goes further?

New Relic's free tier is the more useful one for a real application. It includes 100 GB of ingest every month, one full platform user with APM and tracing, and unlimited basic users who can view dashboards. A solo developer or a two-person startup with modest traffic can run production monitoring there indefinitely, and New Relic emails a warning when an account reaches 85% of its free ingest.

Datadog's free tier covers infrastructure monitoring for up to five hosts with one day of metric retention. APM and log management are separate paid products, so it works for watching a small fleet's health but not for tracing a request through your code. For more options at zero cost, see free uptime monitoring and the observability tools for startups ranking.

Datadog strengths and weaknesses

Strengths. No per-user fee on infrastructure, APM or logs, so adding engineers costs nothing. APM includes 150 GB of span ingest per host, pooled across hosts. Separate products let you buy only what you use, and the 1,000+ integrations on Infrastructure Pro cover most stacks without custom work.

Weaknesses. Every meter is separate, so a full bill combines host fees, span overages, log ingest and log indexing. Autoscaling fleets pay for each instance. On-demand rates run roughly a fifth above annual on the infrastructure and APM lines, so an uncommitted team pays a premium. The Datadog review and Datadog alternatives cover where it fits and what replaces it.

New Relic strengths and weaknesses

Strengths. One data meter for metrics, traces and logs makes the bill easy to forecast from a single number. The free tier includes a full user with APM. Standard is the cheapest paid option in this comparison for teams of up to five full users, and basic users cost nothing.

Weaknesses. Standard caps full platform users at five, and Pro's full-user price is steep. Data Plus costs 50% more per GB than the original data option. Compute-heavy features are metered in compute capacity units on Pro and Enterprise, with pricing through sales. The New Relic review covers the product in depth.

Datadog vs New Relic: which should you choose?

Choose New Relic Standard if five or fewer engineers need full access, your fleet is large or autoscales, and you want one predictable data bill. Choose Datadog if more than five people need full access, your host count is steady, or you want to buy monitoring, APM and logs as separate products. Avoid New Relic Pro unless you need its features or more than five full users, because its seat price dominates the bill. For the wider field, our monitoring tools ranking and log management ranking compare both against Grafana, Sentry and others, and our Sentry pricing page covers the error-tracking piece both products overlap with.

Methodology

All prices, free-tier limits and allotments were read on 19 October 2026 on Datadog's and New Relic's US pricing pages, including their FAQs. The scenario applies each vendor's printed rates to stated volumes (20 hosts, five full users, 500 GB of logs and 20 million indexed events on Datadog, 1,000 GB of total telemetry on New Relic); real volumes differ by stack, and the two data measures are not identical. Totals are our arithmetic. Devshot ran no monitoring workloads for this page; it compares published pricing.

FAQ

Is Datadog more expensive than New Relic?

It depends on hosts and headcount. In our 20-host, five-engineer scenario, Datadog costs $1,004 a month on annual billing, New Relic Standard $766 and New Relic Pro $2,105. Datadog grows with hosts; New Relic grows with data and full users.

How much does Datadog cost per host?

Infrastructure monitoring costs $15 per host a month on Pro and $23 on Enterprise, billed annually, or $18 and $27 on demand. APM adds $31 per host a month with infrastructure attached on annual billing, or $36 on demand, per Datadog's pricing page on 19 October 2026.

How much does New Relic cost?

New Relic is free up to its monthly ingest allowance with one full user. Beyond that, data costs $0.40 per GB, core users $49 a month and full users $10 for the first and $99 for each additional on Standard (up to five), or $349 a month each on Pro with an annual commitment.

Does New Relic charge per host?

No. New Relic bills by data ingested, users and, for some advanced features, compute capacity units. Hosts cost nothing directly, which favors large or autoscaling fleets.

Which has the better free tier?

New Relic. Its free tier gives 100 GB of ingest a month, one full platform user with APM and unlimited basic users. Datadog's free tier covers infrastructure monitoring for up to five hosts with one-day metric retention and no APM or log management.

Can I switch from Datadog to New Relic?

Both accept OpenTelemetry data, which makes it possible to send telemetry to either backend while you compare. Dashboards, alerts and monitors do not move automatically, so budget migration time for those.

Cite this: Devshot, "Datadog vs New Relic 2026: Per-Host vs Per-GB Pricing", November 2026.

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