12 Best Datadog Alternatives & Competitors (2026)

Datadog is a proprietary full-stack observability SaaS with APM, logs, traces, and infrastructure monitoring. Its strength lies in polished dashboards and 500+ integrations, yet teams often migrate because of unpredictable per-host and per-container pricing plus reliance on proprietary agents. SigNoz matches the unified observability experience with native OpenTelemetry instrumentation, correlated signals, and ClickHouse-backed queries while offering self-hosting and usage-based pricing that removes host-based scaling costs.

New Relic provides APM, distributed tracing, and logs with a strong focus on entity-centric views and error tracking. Its pricing model charges by data ingest and users, and OpenTelemetry support remains partial. SigNoz delivers comparable end-to-end tracing and dashboards with full OTel semantic conventions, no user seats, and the option to run entirely on your infrastructure or their cloud at lower predictable cost.

Splunk provides enterprise search and analytics for logs and metrics with SOAR automation capabilities. While powerful for security and compliance use cases, it does not emphasize 99.98% data reduction or open-source multi-agent SRE workflows the way Mezmo does, and its licensing model is often considered expensive for continuous high-ingest scenarios.

Grafana combined with Loki, Tempo, and Prometheus offers open-source visualization and time-series monitoring. It requires stitching multiple tools for full traces-logs-metrics correlation. SigNoz provides the same open-source foundation plus a single unified UI, native OTel pipelines, and ClickHouse storage that simplifies high-scale ingestion without managing separate datastores.

Dynatrace delivers AI-driven observability with Davis causal AI and broad auto-instrumentation. Its strength lies in enterprise-scale root cause analysis, but it does not expose an open-source Rust agent harness or the same level of token-efficient telemetry reduction for custom LLM agents.

Honeycomb focuses on high-cardinality observability and developer-centric querying for distributed systems. It is excellent for tracing but does not provide Mezmo’s multi-agent orchestration framework or 99.98% pre-agent data reduction.

Sumo Logic is a cloud-native log and security analytics platform with machine learning insights. It offers strong search and compliance features yet centers on SaaS ingestion rather than Mezmo’s infrastructure-resident agent control plane and curated context engineering.

Jaeger is a CNCF distributed tracing system focused on OpenTelemetry-compatible spans. It lacks built-in logs, metrics, and dashboards. SigNoz extends the same OTel foundation with unified log management, infrastructure metrics, alerts, and a production-ready UI while preserving full open-source freedom.

AppDynamics focuses on business-transaction monitoring and enterprise APM with deep code-level insights. Its licensing is typically per-agent and expensive. SigNoz provides equivalent transaction tracing and error monitoring through open standards, self-host options, and no per-agent fees, appealing to cost-conscious engineering teams.

Sentry is popular for error tracking and session replays with developer-friendly workflows. It covers only part of the observability stack. SigNoz adds full distributed tracing, metrics, and logs in the same OpenTelemetry-native platform while keeping error monitoring and alerts without separate tool sprawl.