head to head
Datadog vs Uptrace
Uptrace is the open source alternative to Datadog — cloud monitoring and observability platform. Here is the honest comparison.
Yes — Uptrace is a viable free replacement for Datadog. Uptrace is open source under AGPL-3.0, written in Go, with 4,286 GitHub stars, 215 forks and 52 open issues; it was last pushed 1 months ago. Datadog costs from $15, while self-hosting Uptrace 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. Uptrace ranks #4 of 4 tracked open source Datadog alternatives by stars. The tracked set, by adoption: Grafana (76,791 stars), SigNoz (32,116 stars), Highlight (9,375 stars). Replacement criteria on this page: 4 reasons to move to Uptrace and 3 reasons to stay on Datadog.
choose Uptrace 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
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
| Uptrace (open source) | Datadog | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free (self-hosted) | $15-$34/host/month |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Proprietary |
| Source code | Public, auditable | Closed |
| Self-hosting | Yes — uptrace/uptrace | Cloud only |
| Data ownership | Your server, your format | Vendor's cloud |
| Community | ★ 4.3K · ⑂ 215 | — |
| Built with | Go | — |
Why people look for a Datadog alternative
About Uptrace
Uptrace is open source APM platform for modern applications. It sits in Infrastructure & Operations / Monitoring & Observability ecosystem. It supports OpenTelemetry traces, metrics, logs. It gives one interface for application monitoring, distributed tracing, performance monitoring, and log inspection. README says it comes with query builder, rich dashboards, alerting rules, notifications, and integrations for most languages and frameworks. It is written in Go and licensed AGPL 3.0.
read the full Uptrace overview →
Other open source alternatives to Datadog
last updated nightly · ranking method: github stars, live-tracked
Frequently asked questions
Is Uptrace a good replacement for Datadog?
Uptrace is an open source alternative to Datadog (Cloud monitoring and observability platform). It is written in Go and licensed under AGPL-3.0, with 4,286 GitHub stars.
Is Uptrace free compared to Datadog?
Yes. Uptrace 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 Uptrace?
Migration effort depends on the data formats involved. Check Uptrace's documentation for import options, and compare the feature table above to confirm the capabilities you depend on are covered before switching.