Bronto vs. Datadog
Surprise bills and high ingestion costs are forcing teams to consider Datadog alternatives. With Bronto, you can retain all of your logs & traces in one place with full fidelity and sub-second queries.
Why Teams are
Choosing Bronto
High-level comparison across what matters most.
Telemetry Coverage
Full Fidelity Logging & Tracing
No compromises – 100% tracing coverage and no sampling needed. Bring logs together in one centralized platform at an accessible price.
Sampling to Minimize Ingestion
Ingestion & indexing fees encourage customers to sample their logs and adopt shortcuts that reduce event visibility.
Incident Response
Built-in Issue Detection with BrontoScope
Bronto has built a suite of tools that use AI to automate parsing and kick off investigations automatically. No upgrade needed.
Upgrade to Access Watchdog Anomaly Detection
Watchdog is a useful feature for incident response, but it requires upgrading your plan and some manual configuration.
Data Retention
Always Hot, 1 Year Retention
Retain a larger dataset to ensure that your root cause analysis has rich context. No archiving or rehydrating logs to find what matters.
Short-Term Retention (30 Days)
Datadog defaults to 30 days of log retention. Teams accept losing visibility as retaining logs becomes too expensive.
Plans & Pricing
Transparent & Predictable Pricing
No surprise bills. Choose the Bronto plan that is right for you and see how accessible fully-managed logging and tracing can be for your applications.
Expensive Plans & Complex Usage Fees
Proprietary formats and unexpected usage fees make observability feel like a bill to manage instead of a solution that can scale.
Loved by teams
around the world
“Bronto fundamentally changed how we think about logging. We went from treating logs as a necessary evil — expensive, unreliable, and limited — to making them a key asset. The combination of unlimited retention, lightning-fast search, and AI-powered insights means we catch issues much earlier, often before customers notice them. But the real transformation is cultural: every team now has access to the data they need, when they need it.”
Paul Griffin
Head of Platform Engineering
“Bronto's long-term always-hot days mean we can access data with sub-second search, whether it's from last week or last year. This is huge for our security and AI strategy as we continue to revolutionize how we work at Nitro. For AI-powered analysis of our logs, data availability is key — it's just not possible with only a few days of retention. Bronto has become a key part of our toolkit when we think of log data and how it will play an important role for engineering, security and product teams going forward.”
John Fitzpatrick
CTO
“Tasks that used to take 15 minutes are now almost instant. I find myself using Bronto much more than the previous tool simply because it's faster and more responsive. I can quickly ask questions and get immediate answers, which makes it easier to explore insights that were previously hard to uncover. With a year's worth of data retention instead of just 90 days, I can now identify annual trends and patterns I couldn't see before. This extended retention opens the door for much deeper analytics.”
Brian Elliott
Senior Engineering Manager, SaaS Services
“It's a night and day difference to our previous logging provider. Bronto typically returns results in seconds, while our old vendor took over 30 minutes and frequently failed to render visualizations. Bronto has come a long way with everything from usage to UI. Our users are getting what they're looking for.”
Jaymin Patel
Team Lead
“Bronto helped us cut costs and centralize our multi-cloud application logging, as well as providing cost-effective 12 month retention for billing-related events. Troubleshooting is now significantly faster, and having all our logs correlate properly in one place has been a game-changer for our team.”
Joaquín Sargiotto
DevOps Team Lead
“The TCO reduction is significant — we're saving hundreds of thousands annually. But the real value is in new and significantly enhanced capabilities. A significant reduction in time to root cause, investigating issues from months ago, having logs actually available during incidents — these aren't just improvements, they're game-changers. Our SysOps team now get to work on platform innovation instead of keeping Graylog alive.”
Aodh O'Mahony
Engineering Manager
“Bronto fundamentally changed how we think about logging. We went from treating logs as a necessary evil — expensive, unreliable, and limited — to making them a key asset. The combination of unlimited retention, lightning-fast search, and AI-powered insights means we catch issues much earlier, often before customers notice them. But the real transformation is cultural: every team now has access to the data they need, when they need it.”
Paul Griffin
Head of Platform Engineering
“Bronto's long-term always-hot days mean we can access data with sub-second search, whether it's from last week or last year. This is huge for our security and AI strategy as we continue to revolutionize how we work at Nitro. For AI-powered analysis of our logs, data availability is key — it's just not possible with only a few days of retention. Bronto has become a key part of our toolkit when we think of log data and how it will play an important role for engineering, security and product teams going forward.”
John Fitzpatrick
CTO
“Tasks that used to take 15 minutes are now almost instant. I find myself using Bronto much more than the previous tool simply because it's faster and more responsive. I can quickly ask questions and get immediate answers, which makes it easier to explore insights that were previously hard to uncover. With a year's worth of data retention instead of just 90 days, I can now identify annual trends and patterns I couldn't see before. This extended retention opens the door for much deeper analytics.”
Brian Elliott
Senior Engineering Manager, SaaS Services
“It's a night and day difference to our previous logging provider. Bronto typically returns results in seconds, while our old vendor took over 30 minutes and frequently failed to render visualizations. Bronto has come a long way with everything from usage to UI. Our users are getting what they're looking for.”
Jaymin Patel
Team Lead
“Bronto helped us cut costs and centralize our multi-cloud application logging, as well as providing cost-effective 12 month retention for billing-related events. Troubleshooting is now significantly faster, and having all our logs correlate properly in one place has been a game-changer for our team.”
Joaquín Sargiotto
DevOps Team Lead
“The TCO reduction is significant — we're saving hundreds of thousands annually. But the real value is in new and significantly enhanced capabilities. A significant reduction in time to root cause, investigating issues from months ago, having logs actually available during incidents — these aren't just improvements, they're game-changers. Our SysOps team now get to work on platform innovation instead of keeping Graylog alive.”
Aodh O'Mahony
Engineering Manager
“Bronto fundamentally changed how we think about logging. We went from treating logs as a necessary evil — expensive, unreliable, and limited — to making them a key asset. The combination of unlimited retention, lightning-fast search, and AI-powered insights means we catch issues much earlier, often before customers notice them. But the real transformation is cultural: every team now has access to the data they need, when they need it.”
Paul Griffin
Head of Platform Engineering
“Bronto's long-term always-hot days mean we can access data with sub-second search, whether it's from last week or last year. This is huge for our security and AI strategy as we continue to revolutionize how we work at Nitro. For AI-powered analysis of our logs, data availability is key — it's just not possible with only a few days of retention. Bronto has become a key part of our toolkit when we think of log data and how it will play an important role for engineering, security and product teams going forward.”
John Fitzpatrick
CTO
“Tasks that used to take 15 minutes are now almost instant. I find myself using Bronto much more than the previous tool simply because it's faster and more responsive. I can quickly ask questions and get immediate answers, which makes it easier to explore insights that were previously hard to uncover. With a year's worth of data retention instead of just 90 days, I can now identify annual trends and patterns I couldn't see before. This extended retention opens the door for much deeper analytics.”
Brian Elliott
Senior Engineering Manager, SaaS Services
“It's a night and day difference to our previous logging provider. Bronto typically returns results in seconds, while our old vendor took over 30 minutes and frequently failed to render visualizations. Bronto has come a long way with everything from usage to UI. Our users are getting what they're looking for.”
Jaymin Patel
Team Lead
“Bronto helped us cut costs and centralize our multi-cloud application logging, as well as providing cost-effective 12 month retention for billing-related events. Troubleshooting is now significantly faster, and having all our logs correlate properly in one place has been a game-changer for our team.”
Joaquín Sargiotto
DevOps Team Lead
“The TCO reduction is significant — we're saving hundreds of thousands annually. But the real value is in new and significantly enhanced capabilities. A significant reduction in time to root cause, investigating issues from months ago, having logs actually available during incidents — these aren't just improvements, they're game-changers. Our SysOps team now get to work on platform innovation instead of keeping Graylog alive.”
Aodh O'Mahony
Engineering Manager
Try Bronto today to see how fast you can ingest and search TBs of full-fidelity application data.
Feature comparison
| Feature | Bronto | Datadog |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | Ingestion & Search Tiers | Dozens of modules with complex pricing: per-host + per-GB ingest + per-M indexed + custom metrics |
| Hot log retention | 12 months included | 15 days default, archive extra |
| Search cost | 20x - 100x tiered search | Indexed-log fees; archived logs require paid rehydration |
| AI log analysis | BrontoScope, included | Watchdog, only on Pro Plus and Enterprise tiers |
| Time to first value | Minutes via OTel / Fluent Bit | Requires installing proprietary agents with per-product module configuration |
Full fidelity, always hot, fully managed data
Always Hot Data
Every byte of telemetry is instantly queryable — no rehydration, no cold tiers, no waiting.
Long-Term Retention
12 months of retention included out of the box. Keep your data as long as you need it.
Full Fidelity, Full Coverage
No sampling, no aggregation, no data loss. Every log, trace, and metric stored exactly as received.
Transparent Usage & Controls
See exactly what you're ingesting and what it costs. Set quotas, alerts, and exclusion filters in seconds.
Fast at Large Scales
Sub-second queries across petabytes of data. Purpose-built indexing that scales with your growth.
Always Parsed & Searchable
At ingestion, Bronto parses your logs using known formats or AI — so every field is structured and instantly searchable.
