Checkly vs Datadog Synthetics Pricing: Same Checks Compared

Checkly is cheaper than Datadog Synthetics for almost every real workload, usually by 2.5 to 3 times. Datadog charges $12 per 1,000 browser runs and $5 per 10,000 API runs on an annual commitment. Checkly's prepaid packs are $4 and $1.80 on top of a $24 or $64 base plan. Five browser checks every ten minutes cost $259.20 a month on Datadog and $100 on Checkly Starter. Datadog only wins in a thin band just above Checkly's free tier, and it wins there by a few dollars.

Both vendors bill synthetic tests by the run, which makes them easy to compare once you stop looking at the plan names and start counting executions. That is what this post does: the same checks, the same intervals, priced on both rate cards. Every rate below is from the vendors' own pricing pages, and every total is arithmetic you can redo.

How much does Datadog Synthetics cost?

Datadog prices Synthetic Monitoring per run with no plan fee. API tests are $5 per 10,000 runs on an annual commitment, $6 month to month and $7.20 on demand. Browser tests are $12 per 1,000 runs, $15 month to month and $18 on demand. There is no included allowance, so the first run is billed like the millionth.

That structure is simple, and it is expensive at the browser end. One browser run costs $0.012 on the best Datadog rate, twenty-four times what an API run costs. Our Datadog Synthetics pricing breakdown goes through what locations and intervals do to that number; the short version is that both multiply it.

How much does Checkly cost?

Checkly sells a base plan with an allowance, then packs on top. Starter is $24 a month on annual billing or $29 monthly, and includes 25,000 API runs and 3,000 browser runs. Team is $64 or $80 and includes 100,000 API runs and 12,000 browser runs. Extra runs are prepaid at $1.80 per 10,000 API runs and $4.00 per 1,000 browser runs on annual billing, or $2.00 and $5.00 monthly. The free Hobby plan gives you 10,000 API and 1,000 browser runs and simply stops when they are used.

The full plan table, including what each allowance buys at each interval, is on our Checkly pricing page, along with a calculator that turns your list of checks into runs and prices them on both vendors.

Checkly vs Datadog: the per-run rates side by side

Look at the last column before anything else. Even Checkly's overage, the price you pay for runs you forgot to plan for, is below Datadog's best committed rate: $6.50 against $12 for browser runs and $2.60 against $5 for API runs. At the margin, Checkly is the cheaper place to run a synthetic test however badly you budget it.

What the same checks cost on each vendor

Rates only tell you so much, because Checkly has a base fee and Datadog does not. So here are five realistic setups priced on both, annual billing, 30-day month, one location unless stated, no retries.

The gap widens as the workload grows because the base fee stops mattering. For the mixed setup at the bottom, the kind of thing a small SaaS runs across its signup, login and billing APIs, Datadog is $510 a month more, about $6,120 a year. On month-to-month billing it is $959.04 against $324.

Notice too that Starter, not Team, is the cheaper Checkly plan for four of the five rows. That is not a quirk of these examples. Team costs $40 more than Starter on annual billing and its extra 9,000 browser runs are worth $36 in packs, so for browser-heavy work Starter plus packs is always $4 cheaper. Team earns its price through 22 locations, 30-second frequency and ten users, not through runs.

Is Datadog Synthetics ever cheaper than Checkly?

Yes, in one narrow band. If your workload is just past Checkly's free Hobby limits, Checkly's cheapest paid option is the $24 Starter plan, and Datadog charges only for what you run. Datadog is under $24 a month up to 1,999 browser runs, or up to 47,999 API runs if you run no browser tests at all. So between 1,001 and 1,999 browser runs, roughly one browser check every half hour, Datadog is the cheaper bill by a few dollars.

That band is real but small, and it closes the moment you add anything. It also assumes you would otherwise leave Hobby, which is capped at one user and stops running checks when the allowance is spent. A team of three that needs alerts they can count on is on Starter anyway.

Where Datadog is worth the premium

Price is not the only reason people pick Datadog, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. If you already run Datadog APM, logs and infrastructure monitoring, a failing synthetic test lands next to the trace of the request it made, on the same dashboards your on-call team already reads. That correlation saves real minutes during an incident, and minutes are worth money when revenue is down.

So the fair framing is this. If Datadog is already your observability platform, Synthetics is an add-on priced for convenience, and the convenience may be worth two to three times the run cost. If you are choosing a synthetic monitoring tool on its own, Checkly does the same job for a fraction of the price, and its tests live in your repo as Playwright code rather than in a vendor UI.

Either way, detection is only half the job. Once a check fails, somebody has to be woken up, and a tool that pages the right on-call engineer and runs the incident from there is a separate decision from which vendor runs the test.

How to cut the bill on either vendor

The same four levers work on both, because both bill per run:

• Interval. Going from every 5 minutes to every 10 halves the runs. For browser journeys that are not revenue-critical, 15 or 30 minutes is usually enough.
• Locations. Every location that runs in parallel is another run. On Checkly, round-robin scheduling rotates one location per execution, so you get geographic coverage without multiplying the count.
• Retries. Checkly counts each retry as a run. A flaky third-party script can quietly double a browser check's cost.
• The right tool per check. Many of the checks teams put on a synthetic meter are plain endpoint checks: is the URL up, does the JSON contain the right field, is the certificate valid. Those do not need a browser or a run meter.

That last point is where the biggest savings usually are. A flat per-monitor tool checks an API endpoint every minute for the same price as every hour, because there is no meter to feed. Our synthetic monitoring pricing comparison shows how quickly per-run pricing overtakes per-monitor pricing as intervals shorten, and the Checkly alternative page covers the split many teams end up with: scripted browser journeys on Checkly, and every other endpoint on a per-monitor plan.

Checkly vs Datadog Synthetics pricing: which should you buy?

Buy Checkly if you are choosing a synthetic monitoring tool on its merits and your team can write Playwright. It is two and a half to three times cheaper per run, cheaper even at its overage rate, and the Starter plan covers a small team's critical journeys for under $50 a month.

Buy Datadog Synthetics if you already live in Datadog and the correlation with APM and logs is worth paying for. Budget it per run, with locations and interval multiplied in, because there is no allowance to absorb mistakes.

And if most of what you are about to put on either meter is endpoints rather than journeys, move those to UptimeHub: every endpoint checked every minute from six regions, priced per monitor from $9 a month, with a branded status page included. Keep the synthetic budget for the flows that actually need a browser.