Datadog free tier includes Infrastructure monitoring free for up to 5 hosts with 1-day metric retention. Verified November 2026. Compare with 24 alternatives in Monitoring.

Datadog Free Tier 2026

stable

Subtypes in Monitoring: host_metrics — an agent you install on a machine reports CPU, memory, disk and process state for that machine. We read that on 2026-09-01 from https://www.datadoghq.com/pricing/, where it says: “Standard Events and Metrics Up to 5 hosts” How we use this.

Limits, pricing history, and 24 alternatives. Verified November 2026. Last updated 2026-11-12.

Datadog's free tier offers Infrastructure monitoring free for up to 5 hosts with 1-day metric retention. It's stable — zero pricing changes recorded. Best for monitoring workloads — 24 alternatives available.

One of 59 Monitoring services we track. See our full Monitoring Free Tier Comparison →

Tier

Free

Free Tier Details

Infrastructure monitoring free for up to 5 hosts with 1-day metric retention

We read that on 2026-11-12 from https://www.datadoghq.com/pricing/, and our check recorded: the page names Datadog as "datadog" and states "$ 0".

When You'll Outgrow Datadog's Free Tier

When your usage exceeds the free tier limits, you'll need to upgrade.
At that point, the 24 alternatives in Monitoring are each listed with the free tier they offer, so you can compare what they give you against what you have outgrown.

Pricing Change History (0 recorded)

No recorded pricing changes for Datadog. This is a good sign — stable pricing.

View all 513 pricing changes across all vendors →

Alternatives in Monitoring

How Datadog compares against every one of the 24 we list, not against a selection of them. A surface with room for every member of a tied set may rotate their order. A surface with room for only some of them names none of them, because which ones it named would be the claim, and a claim seeded on the date is not the one we serve tomorrow. How we decide this.

Service	Free Tier	Stability
Datadog	Free	stable
Elastic	Free OSS The Elastic Stack — Elasticsearch, Kibana, ingest and basic security — self-managed at no cost on the Free and Open tier under the Elastic License and SSPL, with community support. Platinum (existing customers only) and Enterprise are custom-priced and add machine learning, cross-cluster…	stable
Middleware.io	Free Full-stack observability platform — free forever plan: 100 GB/month data (APM, logs, infrastructure, traces, RUM, synthetics, database, serverless), 1,000 RUM sessions/month, 20,000 synthetic checks/month, 14-day data retention, unlimited users	stable
SigNoz	Free OSS OpenTelemetry-native observability with logs, metrics and traces in one tool. The community edition is free to self-host.	stable
Google Cloud Monitoring	Always Free Always Free: all non-chargeable Google Cloud metrics, first 1M monitoring API calls/month. Dashboards, alerting, and uptime checks for GCP resources Google Cloud's Free Tier requires a billing account. (From docs.cloud.google.com/free/docs/free-cloud-features, read 2026-10-07.) Usage beyond the Free Tier's monthly limits is billed at standard rates. (From docs.cloud.google.com/free/docs/free-cloud-features, read 2026-10-07.)	unrated
skylight.io	Free Application performance monitoring — free for first 100,000 traces/month.	stable
syagent.com	Free Free server monitoring service with alerts and metrics. Up to 25 servers and 25 uptime monitoring instances.	stable
Grafana	Free OSS Grafana OSS — the self-hosted dashboarding and alerting front end, free under AGPL-3.0-only with Apache-2.0 exceptions. Unifies 150+ data sources into one dashboard and supports observability-as-code.	stable
360 Monitoring	Lite Server and website monitoring (formerly Nixstats) — free Lite plan: 1 server monitor, 5 site monitors, 10-minute check interval, 24-hour data retention, email alerts	stable
Axiom	Personal Observability platform — 500 GB ingest/month, 25 GB storage, 30-day retention, 2 datasets, 1 user, 10 GB-hrs/mo query compute, 256 fields/dataset, 3 monitors, Email/Discord notifiers only	unrated
AppSignal	Free Application monitoring (APM, errors, logging) — Our free plan is perfect for startups, hobby, or side-projects 30K requests 1GB logging 5-day retention	caution
New Relic	Free Full observability platform — 100 GB data ingest/month, 1 full platform user, unlimited basic users, 500 synthetic checks, 8+ days retention	stable
Simple Observability	Free Powerful server monitoring in a unified platform for metrics and logs, with no setup complexity. Free for one server.	stable
BetterStack	Free 10 uptime monitors, 3 GB logs (3-day retention), 100K exceptions/mo, 5K session replays, 30 GB metrics, 1 status page, 1 responder	stable
inspector.dev	Free A complete Real-Time monitoring dashboard in less than one minute with a free forever tier.	source unconfirmed
Hyperping	Free Uptime and status page monitoring — free plan: 20 monitors (HTTP, port, ping, keyword), 5-minute check interval, 1 basic status page with real-time updates and subscriber notifications, 1 seat, 1 server monitoring agent, email and webhook alerts	stable
Sematext	Basic (Free) Observability platform — Logs: 500 MB/day ingestion, 7-day retention. Monitoring: 3 hosts, 3 containers/host, 30-min data retention, 1 alert rule.	stable
Jaeger	Free OSS Free OSS (Apache 2.0). CNCF graduated distributed tracing system.	source unconfirmed
bleemeo.com	Free Free for 3 servers, 5 uptime monitors, unlimited users, unlimited dashboards, unlimited alerting rules.	unrated
netdata.cloud	Free Netdata is an open-source tool to collect real-time metrics. It's a growing product and can also be found on GitHub!	unrated
Prometheus	Free OSS Free OSS (Apache 2.0). CNCF graduated time-series monitoring and alerting.	source unconfirmed
Sentry	Developer Developer tier: 1 user, 5K errors/month, 5M spans/month, 50 session replays, 5GB application logs, 1GB attachments	stable
Grafana Cloud	Free Free tier includes access to all Grafana Cloud services with limited usage, 14-day retention, and community support. 10k metric series, 50 GB logs, and 50 GB traces are included.	stable
Xitoring.com	Free Superseded: As of 2026-08-28, xitoring.com reads: The page offers a 14-day free trial, and then paid plans starting at $4.99/mo for Uptime + SSL. We are not publishing our stored Xitoring.com terms beside it — our own pricing change record, discovered 2026-08-28, names them as the previous ones.	unrated — change unconfirmed
fivenines.io	Trial Linux server monitoring with real-time dashboards and alerting — no permanent free tier. 14-day free trial with no credit card required; paid plans from €19/month.	risky

Left out of this list: UptimeRobot (shares no subtype with this product), Pulsetic (shares no subtype with this product), Healthchecks.io (shares no subtype with this product), StatusCake (shares no subtype with this product), PagerDuty (shares no subtype with this product), Cronitor (shares no subtype with this product), Uptimia (shares no subtype with this product), OnlineOrNot (shares no subtype with this product), incident.io (shares no subtype with this product), StatusPile (shares no subtype with this product), assertible.com (shares no subtype with this product), Core Web Vitals History (none of this category's subtypes apply), deadmanssnitch.com (shares no subtype with this product), downtimemonkey.com (shares no subtype with this product), economize.cloud (none of this category's subtypes apply), incidenthub.cloud (shares no subtype with this product), linkok.com (none of this category's subtypes apply), loader.io (none of this category's subtypes apply), MonitorMonk (shares no subtype with this product), OntarioNet.ca CN Test (none of this category's subtypes apply), pagecrawl.io (shares no subtype with this product), pagertree.com (shares no subtype with this product), phare.io (shares no subtype with this product), pingbreak.com (shares no subtype with this product), Pingmeter.com (shares no subtype with this product), pingpong.one (shares no subtype with this product), robusta.dev (none of this category's subtypes apply), Servervana (shares no subtype with this product), sitesure.net (shares no subtype with this product), statusgator.com (shares no subtype with this product), SweetUptime (shares no subtype with this product), UptimeObserver.com (shares no subtype with this product), uptimetoolbox.com (shares no subtype with this product), Wachete (shares no subtype with this product). Each is still listed in Monitoring, with the vendor's own words we read that from on its page. How we decide this.

See full comparison →

Recompute today's order yourself. The order above is a permutation seeded only on the UTC date and the query key — no vendor name, slug, id or offer field is an input. The list above is every one of the 24 entries in that order, not a prefix of it. The algorithm is published, so anyone can reproduce this page's order without asking us.

date: 2026-11-14
query_key: alternatives:Monitoring:Datadog
seed: 23f0ff52c01ad274c0de6291e438ad50efa7bc5bf4d7a26244811198d63e1ea1
tie_count: 13

Comparisons

Datadog vs Sentry Datadog vs Grafana Cloud Datadog vs Grafana Cloud

Alternatives Guides Featuring Datadog

Datadog Alternatives Best Free Monitoring Tools for Developers in 2026 Datadog vs New Relic Free Tier Comparison Free Tiers for Error Tracking, Monitoring & Observability 2026

Watch Datadog for Pricing Changes

We do not push notifications. Every change we record is readable the moment it lands, and the JSON answer carries an ETag — send it back as If-None-Match and an unchanged answer costs one 304.

curl https://agentdeals.dev/api/changes?vendor=Datadog
curl https://agentdeals.dev/pricing-changes/feed.xml?vendor=Datadog

API docs →

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Datadog free?

Yes, Datadog offers a free tier: Free. Infrastructure monitoring free for up to 5 hosts with 1-day metric retention

What is Datadog's free tier?

Datadog's free tier is called "Free". Infrastructure monitoring free for up to 5 hosts with 1-day metric retention

Is Datadog's free tier reliable?

Datadog's free tier is considered stable.

Is Datadog's free tier good for production?

Datadog's free tier can be suitable for small production workloads and side projects. We rate it stable and it offers Infrastructure monitoring free for up to 5 hosts with 1-day metric retention, so it's a reasonable starting point. Monitor your usage against the limits and have an upgrade plan ready.

What changed in Datadog's pricing?

No, Datadog has had no recorded pricing changes. This is a positive stability signal.

What are the best free alternatives to Datadog?

We publish no ranking of these. Nothing we record measures popularity or generosity, so naming a best or a top few would be our preference rather than our data. We hold 24 free alternatives to Datadog in Monitoring, each listed above with its tier. Of those, 13 carry no recorded demerit and are indistinguishable under every signal we hold, so they are listed in an order that rotates daily, 11 are demoted with the reason named. Our ranking rule is published at /criteria.

When will I outgrow Datadog's free tier?

When your usage exceeds the free tier limits, you'll need to upgrade. When you outgrow the free tier, evaluate paid plans against alternatives — sometimes a competitor's free tier covers what you need.

What category is Datadog in?

Datadog is categorized under Monitoring on AgentDeals. We list 24 other Monitoring services alongside it, every one of them on this page with its free tier and the stability we publish for it.