head to head

Datadog vs SigNoz

SigNoz is the open source alternative to Datadog — cloud monitoring and observability platform. Here is the honest comparison.

Yes — SigNoz is a viable free replacement for Datadog. SigNoz is open source under its own open-source terms, written in TypeScript, with 32,116 GitHub stars, 2,493 forks and 1,557 open issues; it was last pushed 3 hours ago. Datadog costs from $15, while self-hosting SigNoz carries no licence fee — the trade is your operational time instead of a subscription. 3 other open source Datadog alternatives are tracked here, led by Grafana at 76,791 stars. SigNoz ranks #2 of 4 tracked open source Datadog alternatives by stars. The tracked set, by adoption: Grafana (76,791 stars), Highlight (9,375 stars), Uptrace (4,286 stars). Replacement criteria on this page: 4 reasons to move to SigNoz and 3 reasons to stay on Datadog.

SigNoz stars ★ 32K license Custom / other self-host yes Datadog pricing $15-$34/host/month

choose SigNoz if

  • Your Datadog bill is growing with seats or usage
  • You need your data in a format and server you control
  • Your compliance posture requires auditing the code that touches sensitive data
  • You have (or can rent) a server and basic Docker comfort

full SigNoz profile →

stick with Datadog if

  • You need the polished onboarding and support SLAs of a commercial vendor
  • Your team has zero capacity to operate software, even self-hosted-simple
  • You depend on a Datadog integration ecosystem that the OSS alternatives have not replicated

Side by side

SigNoz (open source) Datadog
Price Free (self-hosted) $15-$34/host/month
License Custom / other Proprietary
Source code Public, auditable Closed
Self-hosting Yes — signoz/signoz Cloud only
Data ownership Your server, your format Vendor's cloud
Community ★ 32K · ⑂ 2.5K
Built with TypeScript

Why people look for a Datadog alternative

Datadog's pricing is notoriously hard to predict — per-host, per-GB ingested, per-metric, per-feature. Bills routinely surprise engineering teams at scale. A moderate fleet can easily run five figures monthly.

About SigNoz

SigNoz is an open source, OpenTelemetry native observability platform for cloud native applications. It unifies logs, metrics, traces, alerts, and dashboards into a single tool, replacing fragmented monitoring stacks with a correlated signal pipeline. It lives in the observability ecosystem alongside tools like Prometheus, Jaeger, and Grafana, and is positioned as an open alternative to Datadog.

read the full SigNoz overview →

Other open source alternatives to Datadog

Grafana ★ 77K Highlight ★ 9.4K Uptrace ★ 4.3K

last updated nightly · ranking method: github stars, live-tracked

Frequently asked questions

Is SigNoz a good replacement for Datadog?

SigNoz is an open source alternative to Datadog (Cloud monitoring and observability platform). It is written in TypeScript and licensed under its own terms, with 32,116 GitHub stars.

Is SigNoz free compared to Datadog?

Yes. SigNoz is open source — there is no licence fee, and you can self-host it. Datadog is typically a paid subscription, so the trade-off is licence cost against the operational work of running it yourself.

How do I migrate from Datadog to SigNoz?

Migration effort depends on the data formats involved. Check SigNoz's documentation for import options, and compare the feature table above to confirm the capabilities you depend on are covered before switching.