Checkly
Depends
Confidence: Medium
Buy if your engineers will maintain Playwright-based checks and want code-first synthetic monitoring cheaper than Datadog.
New check
Comparison
Checkly vs Datadog
Checkly and Datadog both land on Depends.
Datadog
Depends
Confidence: High
Buy it if you run a mid-to-large engineering org with complex infrastructure and budget for usage-based bills.
| Compare | Checkly | Datadog |
|---|---|---|
| Verdict | Depends | Depends |
| Best for | Dev-led engineering teams | Mid-to-large engineering orgs |
| Who it's not for | Non-technical teams wanting no-code dashboards | Small teams or side projects on a budget |
| Privacy | Public security pages and trust center; disclosed a 2019 incident; named among victims of the 2026 Metabase zero-day.⁹ | No confirmed platform breach in reviewed sources; agent components carry published CVEs and a 2016 incident is documented. |
| Support quality | No support evidence in sources | No support evidence in reviewed sources |
| Public sentiment | Developers on Reddit recommend it for API and browser monitoring while some ask for self-hosted or no-code alternatives.⁸ | Users praise the unified visibility and integration depth, but cost is the loudest complaint across Reddit and review sites.15 |
| Biggest gotcha | Third-party listings say $40/month entry; actual bills scale with check frequency and locations.⁶ | Multi-dimensional billing: hosts, logs, APM, synthetics each metered separately |
Pick Checkly when
- Dev-led engineering teams
- API-heavy products needing authenticated checks
- Teams migrating off Datadog
- CI/CD-integrated E2E testing
When Checkly is not a fit
- Non-technical teams wanting no-code dashboards
- Anyone needing self-hosted monitoring
- Orgs wanting metrics, logs, and traces in one tool
- Solo hobby sites . cheap uptime pings suffice
Pick Datadog when
- Mid-to-large engineering orgs
- Cloud-native, multi-service architectures
- Teams consolidating logs, metrics, traces, security
When Datadog is not a fit
- Small teams or side projects on a budget
- Anyone needing one simple dashboard, not a platform
- Buyers without FinOps oversight of usage bills
Sources
official
- Checkly Pricing Planschecklyhq.comofficial
- Switch to Checkly . save 30-50%checklyhq.comofficial
review
review
- Checkly Pricing Decoded . Autonomagetautonoma.comreview
review
- Metabase SQLi exploit . ChecklyHQ among affectedcsoonline.comsecurity
- Checkly security incident post-mortem (2019)checklyhq.comsecurity
- Checkly security practiceschecklyhq.comofficial
- TrueLayer case study . 60% less effortchecklyhq.comofficial
- LinkedIn monitoring case studychecklyhq.comofficial
- Checkly raises $20M from Baldertonprweb.comnews
review