Datadog alternative: Telemetry Machine vs Datadog
Telemetry Machine prices OpenTelemetry traces, logs, metrics and events by volume, in one plan. Datadog prices APM, logs and metrics separately.
Annual list prices as of 28 October 2026. Datadog sources: pricing, APM, logs, infrastructure, custom metrics and MCP server.
| Telemetry Machine | Datadog | |
|---|---|---|
| Plans | 4 plans, $50 to $1,000 a month, each with an event allowance. 5 metric points count as 1 event. No per-host or per-GB charges. | Per product. APM: $31 per host a month with Infrastructure Monitoring, $36 without. Infrastructure: from $15 per host. Logs: $0.10 per GB ingested, plus a price per million indexed. |
| 10 hosts, 150M spans and 50M logs a month, searchable for 15 days | $200 (Team) | $688 |
| The same, searchable for 30 days | $200 (Team) | At least $840 |
| Retention | 60 days | Indexed spans and logs: 3 to 30 days, priced by period. Flex Logs: up to 15 months. Metrics: 15 months. |
| Metrics | Billed per data point | Metrics that don't come from a Datadog integration are custom metrics, one per combination of name and tag values. 100 per Infrastructure Pro host, then $5 per 100 a month. |
| OpenTelemetry | OTLP from OpenTelemetry SDKs or your own Collector. No vendor agent or SDK. | Recommends its own SDK and Collector distribution. With the OpenTelemetry SDK and upstream Collector, features such as Continuous Profiler, Database Monitoring and RUM aren't available. |
| Querying | Query builder in the app. SQL with joins, subqueries and window functions from tm-cli and MCP. Surface shows what sets outliers apart. | DDSQL (a SQL dialect) or natural language in DDSQL Editor |
| SLOs | 5 to 100 included, $10 a month for each extra | Metric-based, monitor-based and time-slice |
| Dashboards | Dashboards of query widgets | Dashboards, including out-of-the-box ones |
| MCP server | Hosted, with OAuth and a Claude Code plugin. Your agent instruments your app, creates datasets and keys, and checks that data arrives. | Remote, covering APM, logs, metrics, monitors, dashboards and security signals. Fair use: 50 calls per 10 seconds, 100,000 a month. |
Datadog: 10 APM hosts without Infrastructure Monitoring ($360), 140M indexed spans beyond the 10M included ($238 at 15 days), 50 GB of logs ingested ($5) and 50M indexed logs ($85 at 15 days). Span ingestion stays within the 1,500 GB included. A host that sends traces through an OpenTelemetry Collector is a billable APM host.
Telemetry Machine counts the 200M spans and logs as 200M events, within Team's 250M, and keeps them 60 days.
Telemetry Machine stores data in the US.
Run both
Your Collector can send the same data to both, with no change to your code.
- Add Telemetry Machine as a second exporter on your OpenTelemetry Collector, next to the one you have.
- Compare them during the 14-day free trial.
- Switch: remove the old exporter.
14-day free trial. No credit card required.