Choosing the best observability platform for your organization is one of the most impactful infrastructure decisions you'll make. The right choice enables your team to debug faster, ship with confidence, and sleep better at night. The wrong choice drains your budget and leaves you fighting your tools instead of solving problems.
In this guide, we'll compare the major observability platforms across the dimensions that actually matter: features, pricing, performance, ease of use, and total cost of ownership.
Platform Comparisons
| Platform | Best For | Pricing Model | OpenTelemetry |
|---|---|---|---|
 Datadog |
Enterprises with big budgets | Per-host + per-feature | Partial |
 New Relic |
Full-stack visibility | Per-user + data ingest | Good |
 Grafana Stack |
Open-source enthusiasts | Self-hosted or Cloud | Excellent |
 Dynatrace |
AI-driven automation | Per-host | Good |
 Splunk |
Log-centric workflows | Per-GB ingested | Good |
 Qorrelate |
Cost-conscious teams | Usage-based, transparent | Native |
What Makes an Observability Platform "Best"?
Before diving into specific platforms, let's establish the criteria that define a great observability solution:
1. Complete Telemetry Coverage
The best observability platform should handle all three pillars:
- Logs: Structured and unstructured log ingestion, search, and analysis
- Metrics: High-cardinality time-series data with flexible aggregations
- Traces: Distributed tracing with correlation to logs and metrics
2. OpenTelemetry Support
OpenTelemetry is the industry standard. Platforms that embrace it give you vendor independence; those that push proprietary agents lock you in.
3. Performance at Scale
Your observability platform should be fast even when you're ingesting millions of events per second and querying billions of rows.
4. Predictable, Transparent Pricing
Surprise bills kill observability adoption. The best platforms have clear, predictable pricing that doesn't punish you for high cardinality or traffic spikes.
5. Developer Experience
How quickly can you get from zero to insights? The best platforms optimize for time-to-value.
Platform Deep Dives
Datadog
Datadog is the 800-pound gorilla of observability. With a $50B+ market cap and aggressive sales, they've become the default choice for many enterprises.
Strengths:
- Incredibly comprehensive feature set (APM, logs, RUM, synthetics, security)
- Excellent integrations (700+ out of the box)
- Polished UI with good dashboarding
- Strong APM with automatic service discovery
Weaknesses:
- Pricing is the #1 complaint: Per-host pricing + add-ons stack up fast
- Complex pricing model makes budgeting difficult
- Proprietary agent preferred over OpenTelemetry
- Query performance degrades with high cardinality
Typical Cost: $15-50/host/month for infrastructure, $31-40/host/month for APM, $0.10-2.55/GB for logs. A 100-host environment easily exceeds $10,000/month.
New Relic
New Relic pioneered APM and has evolved into a full observability platform. Their "full platform" access model simplifies pricing compared to Datadog's à la carte approach.
Strengths:
- All features included with user licenses (no per-feature add-ons)
- 100 GB/month free tier is generous for small teams
- Strong APM heritage with excellent transaction tracing
- Good OpenTelemetry support
Weaknesses:
- Per-user pricing penalizes organizations with many engineers
- Data ingest costs can spike unexpectedly
- UI can feel dated compared to Datadog
- Query language (NRQL) has a learning curve
Typical Cost: $99-549/user/month + $0.30-0.50/GB ingested. A 20-engineer team with 500GB/month data runs ~$4,000-12,000/month.
Grafana Stack (LGTM)
The Grafana Stack combines Loki (logs), Grafana (visualization), Tempo (traces), and Mimir (metrics) for a fully open-source observability solution.
Strengths:
- 100% open source with no vendor lock-in
- Best-in-class visualization and dashboarding
- Excellent OpenTelemetry and Prometheus support
- Large community and ecosystem
- Grafana Cloud offers managed hosting
Weaknesses:
- Operational complexity: Running LGTM stack requires significant expertise
- Loki's minimal indexing means slow queries for filtered searches
- Multiple components to manage (Loki, Tempo, Mimir, Grafana)
- Correlation between pillars requires manual setup
Typical Cost: Free self-hosted (but significant operational overhead). Grafana Cloud: $0.50/GB logs, $8/user/month.
Dynatrace
Dynatrace differentiates on AI-driven root cause analysis. Their "Davis" AI automatically detects anomalies and identifies probable causes.
Strengths:
- Best-in-class AI/ML for anomaly detection
- Automatic dependency mapping
- Strong code-level profiling
- Good for complex enterprise environments
Weaknesses:
- Very expensive for large deployments
- Requires proprietary OneAgent installation
- Can feel heavyweight and over-engineered for smaller teams
- Less flexible than open-source alternatives
Typical Cost: $69-74/month per 8GB host. Enterprise pricing is opaque and negotiated.
Splunk
Splunk is the legacy leader in log management. While they've added APM and infrastructure monitoring, logs remain their strength.
Strengths:
- Extremely powerful query language (SPL)
- Excellent for security and compliance use cases
- Massive integration ecosystem
- Strong enterprise support
Weaknesses:
- Notorious for high costs: Per-GB pricing adds up fast
- APM and infrastructure monitoring feel bolted-on
- Query performance can be slow at scale
- OpenTelemetry support is secondary to proprietary collectors
Typical Cost: $1,800/GB/year or workload-based pricing. A 1TB/day log environment costs $500,000+/year.
Qorrelate
Qorrelate is a new generation observability platform built on ClickHouse, offering 10-100x cost savings compared to legacy vendors.
Strengths:
- Dramatically lower costs: ClickHouse-powered efficiency
- 100% OpenTelemetry-native (OTLP ingestion)
- Unified logs, metrics, and traces in one platform
- Sub-second queries across billions of events
- Transparent, usage-based pricing
- Session replay included
- 60-second setup with CLI auto-instrumentation
Weaknesses:
- Newer platform with smaller ecosystem
- Fewer pre-built integrations than Datadog
- Not yet proven at Datadog/Splunk scale
Typical Cost: $0.35/GB logs, $0.10/1M spans, $0.10/1M metric samples. That same 100-host environment? Under $500/month.
Pricing Comparison: Real-World Scenarios
Let's compare costs for a realistic mid-sized deployment:
| Scenario | Datadog | New Relic | Qorrelate |
|---|---|---|---|
| 50 hosts, 100GB logs/mo, basic APM | $5,500/mo | $3,200/mo | $185/mo |
| 200 hosts, 500GB logs/mo, full APM | $25,000/mo | $8,500/mo | $625/mo |
| 500 hosts, 2TB logs/mo, enterprise | $75,000+/mo | $22,000/mo | $1,800/mo |
The difference isn't marginal—it's 10-40x. For many organizations, this changes observability from a budget line item that gets scrutinized every quarter to an obvious investment.
The cost gap comes down to architecture. Legacy platforms built on Elasticsearch, PostgreSQL, or proprietary databases have fundamental inefficiencies. ClickHouse-powered platforms like Qorrelate achieve 10-20x better compression and query performance, translating directly to lower costs.
Feature Comparison Matrix
| Feature | Datadog | New Relic | Grafana | Qorrelate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Logs | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Metrics | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Distributed Tracing | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Session Replay | Add-on | Add-on | No | Included |
| OpenTelemetry Native | Partial | Good | Excellent | Native |
| Service Map | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Alerting | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Self-Hosted Option | No | No | Yes | Yes |
| Transparent Pricing | No | Partial | Yes | Yes |
How to Choose the Right Platform
Choose Datadog if:
- Budget is not a primary concern
- You need extensive pre-built integrations
- You want a single vendor for everything (security, synthetics, RUM)
- Your organization already has Datadog expertise
Choose New Relic if:
- You have a small team that needs full platform access
- The 100GB/month free tier covers your needs
- You prefer user-based over host-based pricing
Choose Grafana Stack if:
- You have strong platform engineering capabilities
- Open source is a hard requirement
- You're already invested in Prometheus
- You want maximum flexibility and control
Choose Dynatrace if:
- AI-driven automation is a top priority
- You're in a complex enterprise environment
- Code-level profiling is critical
Choose Qorrelate if:
- Cost efficiency matters: You want enterprise observability without enterprise pricing
- OpenTelemetry is your standard: You're committed to vendor-neutral instrumentation
- Speed is critical: You need sub-second queries at any scale
- Simplicity wins: You want to get started in minutes, not weeks
- All-in-one platform: Logs, metrics, traces, and session replay without add-ons
The Future of Observability Platforms
The observability market is shifting. Here are the trends shaping 2026 and beyond:
1. OpenTelemetry Becomes Non-Negotiable
Proprietary agents are dying. Organizations demand portability, and OpenTelemetry delivers. Platforms that don't embrace it fully will lose.
2. Cost Pressure Intensifies
CFOs are scrutinizing observability spend. The "just use Datadog" default is being challenged by cost-effective alternatives that deliver similar value at a fraction of the price.
3. ClickHouse Emerges as the Observability Database
Elasticsearch's reign is ending. ClickHouse's columnar architecture delivers 10-100x better cost efficiency for analytical workloads. Expect more platforms to adopt it.
4. AI-Assisted Debugging Goes Mainstream
LLM-powered assistants that help interpret logs, suggest root causes, and write queries will become table stakes.
Our Recommendation
There's no universally "best" observability platform—it depends on your constraints, priorities, and existing stack.
But for most organizations in 2026, we recommend starting with a modern, OpenTelemetry-native platform that won't break the bank. You can always add specialized tools later; you can't easily undo a vendor lock-in or recover from observability budget fatigue.
Qorrelate was built for this reality: enterprise-grade observability at startup-friendly prices, with OpenTelemetry at its core and ClickHouse under the hood.
Try Qorrelate free and see the difference for yourself.
Comparing observability platforms for your organization? Check our detailed comparison pages: vs Datadog, vs New Relic, vs Grafana.