Cloudflare vs Datadog: pricing, plans, and positioning compared
Verified pricing and side-by-side plan structures. Updated daily.
Side-by-side comparison
Cloudflare Developer & Infrastructure | Datadog Developer & Infrastructure | |
|---|---|---|
| Entry price | $25/mo | $18/mo |
| Annual discount | −20% | −17% |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Number of tiers | 4 | 3 |
| Positioning | Global CDN, edge compute, and security platform, publicly traded (NET), ~$50B market cap. Positioned as the alternative to AWS CloudFront + Akamai for developers who want simpler pricing and a stronger free tier. Distinctive for Workers (edge compute) and R2 (object storage) undercutting AWS S3 with zero egress fees. Free tier is genuinely production-grade for many projects. Priced $20/mo (Pro) to $200/mo (Business) plus per-usage overages. | The dominant cloud observability platform (metrics, logs, traces, APM), publicly traded (DDOG), ~$45B market cap. Positioned as the alternative to New Relic + Splunk + PagerDuty stitched together. Distinctive for its notorious usage-based pricing that has surprised engineering teams with 6-figure monthly bills (Coinbase's leaked contract was ~$65M/year in 2022). Priced by seat + host + volume across 20+ meters. Popular with engineering teams; feared by finance teams. |
| Full pricing | View full pricing | View full pricing |
Plan-by-plan comparison
| # | Cloudflare | Datadog |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Free Monthly: 0 · Annual: 0 unlimited domains, basic DDoS/CDN | Free Monthly: 0 · Annual: 0 up to 5 hosts, basic metrics |
| 2 | Pro Monthly: 25 · Annual: 20 per domain, advanced security + WAF | Infrastructure Pro Monthly: 18 · Annual: 15 per host, 15-month retention |
| 3 | Business Monthly: 250 · Annual: 200 per domain, prioritized routing | Infrastructure Enterprise Monthly: 27 · Annual: 23 per host, custom retention |
| 4 | Enterprise Monthly: custom · Annual: custom dedicated support + SLA | — |