# The Better Datadog Alternative   Same Features, Better Experience

Tired of surprise invoices, host-based pricing, and complex agent deployments? Switch to Middleware,

a unified, OpenTelemetry-native observability platform that delivers predictable pricing, one-minute setup,
and complete visibility across your infrastructure, applications, and logs.

[Request a Demo](/content/demo-request/index.html) [See Comparison](/content/comparison/datadog-alternative/#comparison-mw/index.html)

## Why You Should ReplaceDatadog with Middleware

### Feature Parity (99%)

APM, infrastructure, logs, distributed tracing, RUM, synthetic, database, container, serverless, and LLM observability — all bundled. If you can do it in Datadog, you can do it here.

- No separate SKUs for APM or RUM
- No "Pro" upgrade for OTel metrics
- Session replay and error tracking included

APM is one SKU. Infrastructure is another. RUM, session replay, error tracking, and custom metrics are each priced separately. You build the bundle; Datadog bills it line by line.

- Per-product pricing tiers
- Custom metrics billed by cardinality
- OTel metrics treated as premium metrics

### No vendor lock-in

Built on OTel from the ground up. Open standards mean portable instrumentation, no proprietary agent lock-in, and one timeline where logs, metrics, traces, and events are correlated automatically.

- Standard OTel collectors, no forks
- Cloud, on-prem, BYOC, or hybrid
- Switch vendors without re-instrumenting

Datadog was built before the cloud-native era.

### Better support and experience

Every Middleware customer gets responsive, hands-on support, including a 1-hour SLA for critical issues. Shared Slack and Teams channels connect you directly with the engineers who built the product.

- 1-hour critical-issue response SLA
- Direct Slack / Teams channels
- Available on every plan, not just Enterprise

### Honest Pricing

Transparent, usage-based pricing. Pay for the data you actually send, billed against real usage — not the worst spike of the month. No tier-gating, no cardinality math, no surprise invoices.

- Pay per GB of data sent
- Unlimited custom metrics included
- 180-day log retention bundled

### Zero Configuration

One install script, a lightweight agent, and full-stack visibility in under a minute. Auto-instrumentation across the stack, automatic service discovery, and Ingestion Control to eliminate noise in two clicks.

- One-line install, no implementation engineer required
- Auto service + dependency discovery
- No custom query language to learn

### Telemetry Patterns

Service-level alerting on real metrics — not one cherry-picked "primary operation". Search every span you have sent. Click any log, jump to the trace.

- Service-level RED metrics, not endpoint-only
- Full-history span search, not just the last 15 minutes
- Logs-to-traces correlation that works with OTel

## Customer Stories

Middleware has played a very good role in transforming our observability and application performance. For instance, we reduced our total observability costs by 50%.
[Read the story](/content/customers/aceturtle/index.html)

We're heavy users of RUM and have tried many tools before discovering Middleware. We've been using OpsAI for the past few weeks, and it has automatically resolved about 60% of our production issues.
[Read the story](/content/customers/hotplate/index.html)

## FAQs

##### What is the main difference between Middleware and Datadog's pricing models?

Middleware offers a transparent pricing model where you only pay for the data size, whereas Datadog uses a host/node-based pricing model.

##### Does Middleware offer a free trial?

Yes, Middleware offers a 14-day free trial with unlimited data ingestion across log monitoring, infrastructure monitoring, APM, and all platform features. No credit card is required to start.