Datadog Competitors and Similar Companies

Datadog is a cloud based event monitoring service headquartered in New York City. In essence, it shows you the internal and external workings of all the systems and processes in your organization in one place. It is used for monitoring system applications, servers, tools, databases, etc. through Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) analytics. Olivier Pomel and Alexis Le-Quoc, who are still involved with the company as its CEO and CTO respectively, established Datadog in 2010. They devised the idea of the platform while working at Wireless Generation, in a bid to tackle the problems they experienced between system administrators and developers.

Name	Datadog
Founded	2010
Headquarters	New York City, NY, US
SIC Code	7372
Status	Public, Independent Company
Industry Sector	System Monitoring
Employees	3200
Trading Symbol	Nasdaq: DDOG

How Datadog makes Money

Datadog’s infrastructure monitoring platform is based on a freemium model. It offers a limited number of its features for free, like visualization and data collection. But if you want more than five hosts, then you will have to go for their paid subscriptions. The higher the price plan, the greater the number of features, just like MongoDB’s revenue model. The top Enterprise subscription has it all, right from personal support to AI-based monitoring alerts. Datadog’s customers usually include big corporations, but it doesn’t deny entry to any small or medium-sized businesses who would be willing to subscribe to its platform.

System Monitoring

System monitoring is the industry that deals in collecting, assessing, and alerting any events in a company’s system to the employees or to another system. It is a relatively smaller but undeniably important part of cloud computing. Did you know that some of the best cloud computing platforms in the world have incorporated Datadog’s software in their algorithm? In fact, its client base includes the “big three”, namely Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. So it doesn’t really come as a surprise to know that Datadog contributes a revenue of more than $1 billion to the system monitoring industry.

Companies Similar to Datadog

Apart from having an outstanding list of clients, Datadog was also featured in the Forbes Cloud 100. And its progress has been pretty rapid over the years, which is why it held a place among Deloitte’s Top Ten Fastest Growing Companies in North America in 2016. The platform is regularly updated, and its customer service is top-notch. But if you still want to make a change, then you can browse through the following competitors of the company.

Datadog Similar Companies

The biggest rivals to Datadog are Dynatrace, New Relic, and AppDynamics. Of these, only the first one comes close to Datadog in terms of revenue. The rest still have a long way to go. Let’s discuss these Datadog competitors in more detail.

Dynatrace

Dynatrace is a system monitoring platform that measures the performance of an application, analyzes its inner workings, and delivers the result of its assessment. It differs from Datadog in the sense that the latter only provides you with the analyzed data; you will have to source the solution yourself. Dynatrace, on the other hand, not only monitors the system and assesses the data, but also gives you a fair output of its analysis through an integrated AI. The platform is used by several businesses and government companies for system monitoring, analytics, cloud automation, enhancing infrastructure security, and so much more.

Infrastructure Monitoring

Infrastructure monitoring is similar to system monitoring, but it comprises the whole of the information technology infrastructure. Dynatrace stepped foot into this industry in 2005, five years before the birth of Datadog. This company was established by Bernd Greifeneder, after which it changed hands a couple of times before going public in 2019. Incidentally, it even acquired a couple of its competitors along the way – Keynote Systems and Spectx. Today, Dynatrace has more than 3000 clients in 90+ countries, with an operating income of $81.31 million.

Annual Revenue	Funding	Headquarters	Employees
$929.45M	$21.9M	Waltham, MA	3600

New Relic

New Relic is a web development firm that creates software for analyzing the performance of web applications. Similar to Datadog, it offers a freemium model, where a single user gets 100 GB free of cost per month. Premium plans allow more users to access the platform, along with 24/7 customer service in the Pro and Enterprise plans. Apart from real-time monitoring of web and mobile apps, New Relic also collects and analyzes any other data you may want, provided that you have a relevant plugin for the same. Did you know that the company was once called one of the coolest cloud infrastructure vendors by a popular tech publication?

Application Performance Monitoring

Just like FitBit and its competitors track your daily health performance, New Relic tracks the performance of computer and mobile applications. The company and its software were launched in 2008 by Lew Cirne. A fun fact: if you look closely at the name, New Relic, you will find that it is an anagram of the founder’s name! The company was featured in NetworkWorld magazine soon after its inception. Today, it serves over 15,000 customers and counting, and Cirne still manages New Relic as its executive chairman.

Annual Revenue	Funding	Headquarters	Employees
$786M	$214.5M	San Francisco, CA	1934

AppDynamics

AppDynamics is a performance management and analytics company headquartered in San Francisco, CA. The company’s software provides almost the same services as that of Datadog and then some. In reality, AppDynamics is more similar to Dynatrace. It tracks the performance of applications through deep diagnostics and provides the results to the user. It is used by big and small businesses alike in various departments like cloud computing, app security, observability, network architecture, and IT infrastructure monitoring.

System Monitoring / Performance Management

AppDynamics entered the application performance management (APM) industry in 2008. Founded by Jyoti Bansal, it was eventually acquired by Cisco in 2017. But Bansal still serves as the executive chairperson of the company, and also its chief strategist. Did you know that it currently collaborates with IBM to render mainframe transaction visibility? And the company sits right at the top of the chain in the APM industry with a customer base of over 2000 which is growing every year.

Annual Revenue	Funding	Headquarters	Employees
$143.8M	$364.5M	San Francisco, CA	600

Conclusion

Datadog’s biggest competitor is Dynatrace. It provides all the services that Datadog does and more. Dynatrace excels in flexibility and variety, whereas Datadog is more focused on system monitoring at the highest level. The one major advantage that Dynatrace has over Datadog is that it not only renders the analysis and monitoring results but also provides solutions to tackle any underlying problems. In terms of revenue, Datadog is slightly ahead of Dynatrace, making it a really close race to the top, which at times reflects the competition between Samsung and Apple. So, it won’t be a bad idea for you to let go of Datadog’s structured services in favor of Dynatrace’s flexible offerings.