LogicMonitor vs Datadog Pricing, Cost per Host and Device

At list price on annual billing, Datadog is cheaper than LogicMonitor for servers and much cheaper for network gear, and LogicMonitor is cheaper only for wireless access points. A server costs $15 a month on Datadog Infrastructure Pro against $16 per hybrid unit on LogicMonitor Essentials. A switch or firewall costs $7 on Datadog Network Device Monitoring against a full $16 unit on LogicMonitor. An access point costs $4 on Datadog and $3.20 on LogicMonitor, because one hybrid unit covers five of them. The gap can close once logs and NetFlow enter the bill, since LogicMonitor bundles them and Datadog meters them.

Both vendors publish their rates, which makes this one of the few observability comparisons you can actually compute. Everything below comes from logicmonitor.com/pricing, LogicMonitor's additional pricing page and usage docs, and Datadog's public price list for the US site. The totals are arithmetic you can check.

How much does LogicMonitor cost?

LogicMonitor sells three packages priced per hybrid unit per month: Essentials at $16, Advanced at $27 and Signature plus Edwin AI at $53. A hybrid unit is one device monitored through a collector, one cloud VM, seven cloud PaaS resources or five wireless access points. The prices are starting list prices "based on standard minimum quantities and terms", and the minimums are not published. Every package includes infrastructure monitoring, LM Logs, NetFlow, config monitoring and dashboards. Website checks (LM Uptime) are included from Advanced up. The unit conversion, the package-by-package feature split and a calculator are on our LogicMonitor pricing breakdown.

How much does Datadog cost?

Datadog prices each product separately, and every line has three rates: billed annually, month to month, and on demand. The lines that matter for a like-for-like comparison are these.

LogicMonitor's package prices are quoted on contract terms, so the fair comparison is against Datadog's annual column. On month-to-month billing Datadog's host price rises to $18 and overtakes LogicMonitor Essentials.

LogicMonitor vs Datadog cost per server, switch and access point

The two vendors disagree most on network equipment. LogicMonitor charges a switch the same full hybrid unit as a server. Datadog has a separate, cheaper line for network devices.

Per server the two are within a dollar at the entry tier and $4 apart at the upper tier, both in Datadog's favor. Per switch, Datadog costs less than half. Per access point, LogicMonitor Essentials is 20% cheaper, and it is the only row where LogicMonitor wins on the rate card.

Four estates priced both ways

Rates per resource only matter once you add up a real mix. Here are four estates, priced per month at list on annual billing. The mixed estate includes 10 websites checked every minute, which is 432,000 check runs a month.

The network-heavy estate is the striking one: Datadog Pro comes in at 58% of LogicMonitor Essentials, entirely because of the $7 network device line. The Wi-Fi-heavy estate is the only one where LogicMonitor Essentials is the cheapest option on the table. For a pure server fleet the two are close enough that features, not price, should decide.

The mixed row carries a caveat in LogicMonitor's column. Website checks are a paid add-on on Essentials and included on Advanced, and LogicMonitor does not publish the add-on price or the allowance included in Advanced. Datadog's $216 for the same checks is on its price list.

Both vendors meter website checks in blocks of 10,000 runs

This is the most useful detail in the comparison and the one nobody mentions. LogicMonitor's usage documentation says each LM Uptime unit includes up to 10,000 check executions a month, summed across all checks. Datadog sells synthetic API tests per 10,000 runs at $5 a month on annual billing. The unit is identical. Only one of them prints a price on it.

That makes Datadog's rate a reasonable yardstick when you negotiate LM Uptime. One URL checked every minute runs 43,200 times in a 30-day month, 4.32 blocks, which is $21.60 a month on Datadog. Check it every five minutes and it is 8,640 runs, under one block, $4.32. The interval is the price on both platforms, which is why teams that only want to know whether a site is up usually find per-run billing the wrong model. The Datadog side is worked through in detail in our Datadog Synthetics pricing post.

What the list prices leave out

Three things move the real bill away from the tables above.

Logs and NetFlow. LM Logs and NetFlow monitoring are included in every LogicMonitor package. Datadog charges $0.10 per GB ingested plus indexing, and $0.60 per million NetFlow records at 15-day retention. A team with heavy log volume can erase Datadog's per-host advantage quickly. LogicMonitor does not publish how much log volume its packages include, so ask.

Minimums and overage. LogicMonitor quotes minimum quantities and an on-demand overage rate in the contract, not on the website. Datadog publishes its on-demand column, which runs 20% above annual for hosts and 45.7% above annual for network devices. Before you sign either, get the overage rate in writing and keep the renewal date and true-up terms in your contract records, because the renewal is where both vendors recover discounts.

Custom metrics and containers. Datadog meters custom metrics beyond the per-host allowance and bills containers separately. LogicMonitor counts seven PaaS resources per unit. Estates built on Kubernetes and serverless need their own model on both sides.

Is LogicMonitor cheaper than Datadog?

Usually not at list price. On annual billing Datadog is cheaper per server by $1 at the entry tier and cheaper per network device by $9, so a typical mix of servers and network gear costs less on Datadog before logs. LogicMonitor wins at list only when wireless access points dominate the estate, and it can win overall when you would otherwise pay Datadog for large log or NetFlow volumes that LogicMonitor bundles.

Which is better for network monitoring, LogicMonitor or Datadog?

On price, Datadog, by a wide margin: $7 a device against $16. On depth, LogicMonitor has the longer history in network monitoring, with automated discovery, topology mapping and config change tracking in every package, and its collector model suits on-prem gear well. Network-heavy buyers should run a trial of both and weigh whether LogicMonitor's bundled network features are worth more than double the per-device rate.

Should you use either one for website uptime monitoring?

Only if you already run the platform for infrastructure. Both meter website checks by the run, so the bill rises every time you shorten the interval, and neither gives your customers a status page. For public sites and APIs, a flat per-monitor tool is simpler to budget: UptimeHub checks 20 endpoints every minute on Starter for $9 a month billed yearly, and 100 endpoints every 30 seconds on Pro for $29, with a branded status page on every plan. Keep the platform for the servers and the network, and put the customer-facing checks where they cost a fixed amount. The rest of the per-run market is compared in our synthetic monitoring pricing comparison.