New Relic
Depends
Confidence: High
Buy if you run a complex, distributed stack and want metrics, logs, and traces in one platform.
Comparison
New Relic vs Datadog
New Relic 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 | New Relic | Datadog |
|---|---|---|
| Verdict | Depends | Depends |
| Best for | Mid-to-large engineering orgs | Mid-to-large engineering orgs |
| Who it's not for | Small apps or side projects . massive overkill | Small teams or side projects on a budget |
| Privacy | Disclosed 2023 intrusion via stolen credentials; older agent CVEs are patched; no open critical issues found in sources reviewed.⁷ | No confirmed platform breach in reviewed sources; agent components carry published CVEs and a 2016 incident is documented. |
| Support quality | No direct support evidence found | No support evidence in reviewed sources |
| Public sentiment | Users praise real-time visibility and platform breadth, but cost and complexity draw the loudest complaints.³ | Users praise the unified visibility and integration depth, but cost is the loudest complaint across Reddit and review sites.11 |
| Biggest gotcha | Usage-based ingest means a busy month can silently balloon your bill.⁴ | Multi-dimensional billing: hosts, logs, APM, synthetics each metered separately15 |
Pick New Relic when
- Mid-to-large engineering orgs
- Microservices-heavy stacks
- Teams wanting one observability platform
- SRE/DevOps groups tracking MTTR
When New Relic is not a fit
- Small apps or side projects . massive overkill
- Bootstrapped startups watching every dollar
- Low-traffic sites (free alternatives exist)
- Teams needing only simple uptime monitoring
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
- New Relic Pricingnewrelic.comofficial
review
- New Relic Reviews on G2g2.comreview
- NewRelic unethical billing . Redditreddit.comreview
review
review
security
- CVE-2017-9246 Detail . NVDnvd.nist.govsecurity
news
- Gartner Peer Insights: New Relic reviewsgartner.comreview
review
- Datadog Pricing Breakdown . Finoutfinout.ionews
- Your Datadog Bill Is About to Get Worse . OneUptimeoneuptime.comnews