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 Logs, Traces, & Metrics
No sampling or tiered-storage. Store all of your observability data in one AI-native platform.
Sampling to Minimize Ingestion
Ingestion & indexing fees encourage customers to sample their logs and adopt shortcuts that reduce event visibility.
Incident Response
AI-Assisted Troubleshooting
Bronto has built a suite of tools that use AI to automate parsing and kick off investigations automatically.
Upgrade for Watchdog Anomaly Detection
Watchdog is a useful feature for incident response, but it requires upgrading your plan & manual configuration.
Data Retention
12-Month Always Hot Retention
Query TBs of logs, traces, & metrics over multiple months with sub-second search. No rehydration needed.
Short-Term Retention (30 Days)
Datadog defaults to 30 days for retention. Teams have to accept blindspots to mitigate their costs.
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.
One platform for all of your data
Logs
Filter with smart SQL autocomplete and keyboard-driven shortcuts. Results return in seconds — even across terabytes. Drill into any attribute, view raw logs, or jump straight into traces from the log table.
Loved by teams
around the world
“The combination of long-term retention, lightning-fast search, and AI-powered insights means we catch issues much earlier, often before customers notice them.”
Paul Griffin
Head of Platform Engineering
“We can access data with sub-second search, whether it's from last week or last year. For AI-powered analysis of our logs, data availability is key — it's just not possible with only a few days of retention.”
John Fitzpatrick
CTO
“Tasks that used to take 15 minutes are now almost instant. 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.”
Brian Elliott
Senior Engineering Manager
“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.”
Jaymin Patel
Team Lead
“Bronto helped us cut costs and centralize our multi-cloud application logging. Troubleshooting is now significantly faster, and having all our logs correlate properly in one place has been a game-changer.”
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
“The combination of long-term retention, lightning-fast search, and AI-powered insights means we catch issues much earlier, often before customers notice them.”
Paul Griffin
Head of Platform Engineering
“We can access data with sub-second search, whether it's from last week or last year. For AI-powered analysis of our logs, data availability is key — it's just not possible with only a few days of retention.”
John Fitzpatrick
CTO
“Tasks that used to take 15 minutes are now almost instant. 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.”
Brian Elliott
Senior Engineering Manager
“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.”
Jaymin Patel
Team Lead
“Bronto helped us cut costs and centralize our multi-cloud application logging. Troubleshooting is now significantly faster, and having all our logs correlate properly in one place has been a game-changer.”
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
“The combination of long-term retention, lightning-fast search, and AI-powered insights means we catch issues much earlier, often before customers notice them.”
Paul Griffin
Head of Platform Engineering
“We can access data with sub-second search, whether it's from last week or last year. For AI-powered analysis of our logs, data availability is key — it's just not possible with only a few days of retention.”
John Fitzpatrick
CTO
“Tasks that used to take 15 minutes are now almost instant. 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.”
Brian Elliott
Senior Engineering Manager
“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.”
Jaymin Patel
Team Lead
“Bronto helped us cut costs and centralize our multi-cloud application logging. Troubleshooting is now significantly faster, and having all our logs correlate properly in one place has been a game-changer.”
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.
