Pricing drove a switch to Grafana → Grafana
“By switching to Better Stack, we were able to cut our monitoring and alerting costs by 90%”
Datadog alternatives: where its users went, and why they left
Datadog (datadoghq.com) has 29 sourced reports on Friction, drawn from 53 public source threads (as of 2026-10-15), 6 of them describing a move away. This page reads them for one question: if you are leaving Datadog, what do its users say they moved to, and what pushed them out?
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Where Datadog users say they went
Switching reports that name a destination. A count is the number of reports naming it, not a market share: Friction only holds what people say in public.
| Named alternative | Reports naming it | Newest report |
|---|---|---|
| Grafana (compare) | 1 | 2025 |
| Prometheus/Grafana | 1 | 2024 |
| HyperDX | 1 | 2024 |
| AWS | 1 | 2024 |
| Grafana Cloud | 1 | 2023 |
In their words
Seeking a quick migration path from Datadog batch intake → HyperDX
“I'm looking for the quickest way to switch over”
What pushes people away from Datadog
The most-reported open problems, worst severity first. Each links to the item with its source.
Per-host pricing encourages infrastructure-focused monitoring · Pricing & plans · Blocks work
“their per-host model incentivizes you to care about infrastructure topology rather than user-facing behavior”
Datadog pricing is difficult to justify · Pricing & plans · Annoyance · 3 people
“they suck but not enough to leave”
Missing feature in the Datadog Python library went unanswered · API & developer experience · Annoyance
“they just never responded”
Datadog billing is difficult to understand · Billing · Annoyance
“you have to learn their billing world, which is in itself very painful”
Custom metrics can make Datadog bills exceed expectations · Pricing & plans · Annoyance
“you think you're paying X but really you end up paying 2-3X or more by the end of the year”
Other observability and monitoring tools on Friction, and what their users struggle with
Switching trades one set of problems for another. The same evidence, for each tool Friction covers in this category:
Sentry
20 reports · 93 source threads · most-discussed area: Integrations
Grafana
19 reports · 97 source threads · most-discussed area: UI & usability
Counts and reports reflect people who post in public (developers and technical buyers are over-represented). A tool with fewer reports is not a better tool; it may only be discussed less. How the data is built.