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.
RETAIN AND ANALYZE MORE DATA
Datadog
BrontoEstimate your monthly bill on each platform.
Toggle data volumes, and slide all the way left to exclude a signal.
Datadog is priced for 50 hosts (50 for every 50 GB/day of traces or 100K series). Datadog list prices on annual billing. Bronto plans are chosen by ingest alone: Starter up to 1 TB a month, Pro up to 5 TB, with unlimited users.
Customize in the full calculatorSave $13,990 a month
Datadog costs 15× as much, with shorter log and trace retention.
High-level comparison across what matters most.
Telemetry Coverage
No sampling or tiered-storage. Store all of your observability data in one AI-native platform.
Ingestion & indexing fees encourage customers to sample their logs and adopt shortcuts that reduce event visibility.
Incident Response
Bronto has built a suite of tools that use AI to automate parsing and kick off investigations automatically.
Watchdog is a useful feature for incident response, but it requires upgrading your plan & manual configuration.
Data Retention
Query TBs of logs, traces, & metrics over multiple months with sub-second search. No rehydration needed.
Datadog is modeled with 30 days of log retention. Teams have to accept blindspots to mitigate their costs.
Plans & 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.
Proprietary formats and unexpected usage fees make observability feel like a bill to manage instead of a solution that can scale.
Petabyte-scale log search with SQL, live tail and instant filtering.
“The combination of long-term retention, lightning-fast search, and AI-powered insights means we catch issues much earlier, often before customers notice them.”
| Feature | | |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | Dozens of modules with complex pricing: per-host + per-GB ingest + per-M indexed + custom metrics | Ingestion & Search Tiers |
| Hot log retention | 30 days modeled, archive extra | 12 months included |
| Search cost | Indexed-log fees; archived logs require paid rehydration | 20x - 100x tiered search |
| AI log analysis | Watchdog, only on Pro Plus and Enterprise tiers | BrontoScope, included |
| Time to first value | Requires installing proprietary agents with per-product module configuration | Minutes via OTel / Fluent Bit |
Every byte of telemetry is instantly queryable — no rehydration, no cold tiers, no waiting.
12 months of retention included out of the box. Keep your data as long as you need it.
No sampling, no aggregation, no data loss. Every log, trace, and metric stored exactly as received.
See exactly what you're ingesting and what it costs. Set quotas, alerts, and exclusion filters in seconds.
Sub-second queries across petabytes of data. Purpose-built indexing that scales with your growth.
At ingestion, Bronto parses your logs using known formats or AI — so every field is structured and instantly searchable.
