compare · observability pricing
Datadog vs Splunk pricing per host, with APM, logs and autoscaling costed
Short answer: on plain servers they cost the same, $15 a host a month billed annually on both. Datadog is cheaper once you add APM, $46 a host against Splunk's $60 bundle. Splunk is cheaper for fleets that autoscale, because it averages hourly host counts across the month while Datadog bills close to the peak. Logs are where the two stop being comparable: Datadog publishes per-GB rates and Splunk quotes them.
US list prices read from datadoghq.com/pricing/list and splunk.com/en_us/products/pricing.
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$15 = $15
one server a month on Datadog Infrastructure Pro and Splunk Infrastructure, billed annually
23% less
on Datadog for 25 hosts that need APM, $1,150 against $1,500 a month
$900 vs $354
a month for a 20-host fleet that bursts to 60 hosts for 66 hours
how each one bills
One sells products, the other sells bundles
Datadog and Splunk land on the same shortlist when a US platform team wants one SaaS console for servers, Kubernetes, traces and logs. The first line of each price list is identical. The difference is structure. Datadog prices every product on its own meter: infrastructure per host, APM per APM host, logs per GB ingested and per million events indexed, synthetic tests per run. You add the lines you use.
Splunk Observability Cloud sells three bundles per host a month, billed annually: Infrastructure at $15, App & Infra at $60 and End-to-End at $75. APM and synthetic API tests arrive with App & Infra; real user monitoring and browser synthetics need End-to-End. Metrics from Splunk's cloud integrations that are not tied to a host are covered, and there is no seat fee.
So Datadog rewards teams that use a few products heavily, and Splunk rewards teams that want everything for a known price per host. Neither is cheaper in general. The estates below show where each one wins.
Datadog, one meter per product
Infra host
$15
APM host
$31
Log GB
$0.10
1M indexed logs
$1.70
10k API tests
$5
1k browser runs
$12
Splunk, one price per host
infra, uptime checks, log connect
adds APM, profiling, API tests
adds RUM and browser tests
rate cards side by side
Datadog vs Splunk pricing, line by line
US list prices, billed annually unless noted, from Datadog's pricing list and billing documentation and from Splunk's pricing page and Infrastructure Monitoring billing documentation. Both vendors discount through sales and on multi-year terms, so read every figure as where the quote starts. AlertPing appears only where it does the same job.
| What you are buying | Datadog | Splunk Observability Cloud | AlertPing |
|---|---|---|---|
| Infrastructure per host | Pro $15, Enterprise $23 ($18 and $27 month to month) | Infrastructure bundle $15 | Not offered |
| How hosts are counted | Hourly, billed on the highest hour after dropping the top 1% | Hourly, averaged over the month | Flat plan, counted in monitors |
| Containers | 5 per host on Pro, 10 on Enterprise, then $1 a container a month | 10 per host on the standard plan, 20 on enterprise, pooled | Not offered |
| Custom metrics | $5 per 100 a month | 100 series per host standard, 200 enterprise | Not applicable |
| APM | $31 per APM host on top of the infra host; Pro $35, Enterprise $40 | App & Infra bundle, $60 per host | Not offered |
| Log ingestion and indexing | $0.10 per GB ingested, $1.70 per million events indexed for 15 days | Log Observer Connect in every bundle; log storage priced by quote on the Splunk platform | Not offered |
| Real user monitoring | $0.15 per 1,000 sessions measured, $3 per 1,000 investigated | End-to-End bundle, $75 per host | Not offered |
| Synthetic API tests | $5 per 10,000 runs, 1-minute floor | From App & Infra, allowance not published | Every plan, 60 s on Starter, 30 s from Team |
| Plain URL uptime check | Billed as an API test run | Synthetic Uptime in every bundle, allowance not published | 20 monitors for $49 a month, 2 regions |
| Browser tests | $12 per 1,000 runs | End-to-End bundle | Not offered |
| On-call paging | On-Call $20 per seat a month | Splunk On-Call from $5 per user, up to 10 seats | Escalation and on-call on Team, $59 a month flat |
| Users | No seat fee for monitoring | No seat fee | 3 to unlimited members by plan |
| Going over the plan | On-demand rates, $18 per infra host, $36 per APM host | Overage can reach 150% of monthly list per element | Upgrade to the next plan |
four estates, priced
Is Datadog cheaper than Splunk? Four estates priced
Monthly list price, billed annually. Datadog is the sum of the products each estate needs. Splunk is hosts times the bundle that covers them. Where a vendor does not publish the number, the card says so instead of guessing.
30 Linux servers
Infrastructure only, a handful of containers
Cheaper on list: A tie
Datadog Infrastructure Pro and Splunk Infrastructure are both $15 a host.
Kubernetes, 30 nodes
300 containers, 10 a node
Cheaper on list: Splunk, by $150
Datadog Pro covers 5 containers a node, so 150 extra containers add $150. Datadog Enterprise covers 10 a node but costs $690.
25 hosts with APM
Infrastructure plus distributed tracing
Cheaper on list: Datadog, 23% less
Datadog is $15 plus $31 per host. Splunk moves every host on the plan to the $60 App & Infra bundle. That is $13,800 against $18,000 a year.
25 hosts, APM, RUM and browser tests
200,000 sessions, 5 browser tests every 5 minutes from 2 locations
Cheaper on list: Splunk, on list
Datadog adds $30 of RUM and $1,052 of browser runs. Splunk's End-to-End price is $75 a host, but its page does not publish how many sessions or runs that covers.
The APM row decides most real purchases. Splunk no longer lists APM as its own line, so the first service you trace moves every host on the plan from $15 to $60. Datadog charges the $31 APM price only on hosts that actually send traces. If 10 of your 25 hosts run instrumented services, Datadog is $685 a month (25 infra hosts plus 10 APM hosts) against Splunk's $1,500, unless Splunk lets you split the estate across two bundles, which is a question for the quote.
the counting rule nobody compares
Why autoscaling fleets cost less on Splunk
Both vendors count hosts every hour. What they do with the 730 hourly counts in a month is different. Datadog's billing documentation says it sorts them and bills on the highest count left after dropping the top 1%, which is about 7 hours. Splunk's billing documentation says it averages the hourly counts over the month.
Take 20 hosts that scale to 60 for three hours every weekday, 66 hours a month. Datadog bills the 60-host peak, because the burst lasts far longer than the 7 hours it forgives: $900 a month on Pro. Splunk bills the average, 23.6 hosts, or $354. A single 5-hour spike in a month flips the result: Datadog ignores it and bills $300, Splunk averages it in at $304.
Rule of thumb: if your fleet spends more than about 7 hours a month above its baseline, Splunk's averaging is worth real money. Datadog does sell container and serverless pricing that softens this for workloads that fit it.
One weekday, hosts running each hour
Datadog bills
60 hosts
$900 a month
Splunk bills
23.6 hosts
$354 a month
Burst of 40 extra hosts, 3 hours a day, 22 weekdays. Infrastructure tier on both, $15 a host.
logging
Datadog vs Splunk for logging
This is the one comparison you cannot finish from public prices. Datadog publishes two log meters: $0.10 per GB ingested and $1.70 per million events indexed with 15-day retention ($1.27 for 7 days, $2.50 for 30). A team that ingests 500 GB a month and indexes 300 million events for 15 days pays $50 plus $510, so $560 a month on list.
Splunk's observability bundles include Log Observer Connect, which queries logs you keep in the Splunk platform. The platform itself is priced by activity, workload or ingest, and the pricing page sends you to a quote. If your company already pays for Splunk Cloud Platform or Splunk Enterprise, the logs are effectively sunk cost and Splunk Observability looks cheap. If it does not, you are buying two Splunk products and should price them together.
Datadog ingest
$0.10 per GB
Everything you send, whether you index it or not.
Datadog index, 15 days
$1.70 per million
Only the events you keep searchable.
Splunk in the bundle
Log Observer Connect
Search and correlate logs held on the Splunk platform.
Splunk storage
Quote
Activity-based, workload or ingest pricing on the platform.
outside-in checks
Uptime checks on Datadog and Splunk
Both platforms will tell you a public URL is down. Datadog bills every check as an API test run at $5 per 10,000, with one minute as the fastest interval. Twenty URLs checked every minute from one location is 876,660 runs a month, $438. From three locations it is $1,315. Splunk includes Synthetic Uptime in every bundle but publishes no allowance, and you cannot buy the bundle without hosts.
If the job is simply "wake the on-call engineer and update customers the moment checkout stops answering", that is a lot of platform for one signal. AlertPing does that job flat: 20 monitors from two regions with SMS, email, Slack, webhooks and a public status page for $49 a month, and 100 monitors at 30-second intervals with escalation and on-call for $59. It runs next to either platform and keeps alerting on the day the platform has its own incident.
| 20 URLs, checked every minute | Monthly |
|---|---|
| Datadog API tests, 1 location | $438 |
| Datadog API tests, 3 locations | $1,315 |
| Splunk Synthetic Uptime | Inside a host bundle, allowance not published |
| AlertPing Starter, 2 regions, 60 s | $49 |
| AlertPing Team, 2 regions, 30 s, up to 100 URLs | $59 |
who should buy which
Which one fits your team
choose datadog
APM on some hosts, steady fleets
You want to pay for tracing only where services are instrumented, your host count is fairly flat, and you like buying products one at a time with published rates for logs, RUM and tests.
choose splunk
Autoscaling, or already on Splunk
Your fleet bursts for hours at a time, you want APM, RUM and synthetics under one host price, or your security team already runs Splunk for logs and SIEM, which makes Log Observer Connect close to free.
add alertping
Customer-facing uptime, flat
External checks on websites, APIs, ports, SSL and cron jobs with SMS and a status page on every plan. It does not replace either platform; it is the check that does not share their failure modes or their meters.
See AlertPing plansquestions buyers ask
Datadog vs Splunk questions
Is Datadog cheaper than Splunk?
For plain servers neither is cheaper: both list $15 a host a month billed annually. Datadog is cheaper when you add APM, $46 a host against Splunk's $60 App & Infra bundle, and much cheaper when only some hosts need traces. Splunk is cheaper for fleets that autoscale for hours at a time, because it averages hourly host counts instead of billing near the peak.
How does Datadog vs Splunk pricing work?
Datadog prices each product separately: $15 per infrastructure host, $31 per APM host, $0.10 per GB of logs ingested, $1.70 per million events indexed, $5 per 10,000 API test runs. Splunk Observability Cloud sells three bundles per host, $15, $60 and $75 a month billed annually, with more products included at each step and no seat fee.
Datadog vs Splunk for logging, which costs less?
Only Datadog publishes log rates, $0.10 per GB ingested and $1.70 per million events indexed for 15 days. Splunk's observability bundles include Log Observer Connect, but the logs live on the Splunk platform, which is priced by quote. Teams already paying for Splunk Cloud Platform usually find Splunk cheaper for logs; teams starting from nothing can price Datadog in advance.
Are Datadog and Splunk the same?
No. Both sell infrastructure monitoring, APM, logs, real user monitoring and synthetic tests, but Datadog started as a cloud metrics SaaS priced per product, while Splunk started as a log search platform and now sells Observability Cloud as per-host bundles. Splunk is also a major SIEM vendor through Enterprise Security.
Does Datadog or Splunk charge per user?
Neither charges a seat fee for monitoring. Seats appear only in paging products: Datadog On-Call is $20 per seat a month billed annually, and Splunk On-Call starts at $5 per user a month for up to 10 seats.
How are hosts counted on Datadog and Splunk?
Both count hosts every hour. Datadog bills the highest hourly count after discarding the top 1% of hours, about 7 hours a month. Splunk averages the hourly counts across the month. A fleet that sits above its baseline for more than about 7 hours a month pays noticeably less on Splunk.
Can Datadog or Splunk monitor website uptime?
Yes. Datadog bills each uptime check as an API test run, $5 per 10,000 runs, so 20 URLs checked every minute from one location cost about $438 a month. Splunk includes Synthetic Uptime in every bundle without publishing an allowance. A dedicated service such as AlertPing covers 20 monitors from two regions for $49 a month.
What happens if we go over our committed hosts?
Datadog bills usage above your commitment at its on-demand rates, $18 per infrastructure host and $36 per APM host. Splunk's billing documentation says overage fees can be as high as 150% of the monthly list price for each element, so up to $22.50 per Infrastructure host.
keep reading
Related comparisons
The outside check neither platform prices flat
Websites, APIs, ports and heartbeats checked from two regions, SMS and a status page on every plan, from $49 a month.