Sentry vs Datadog is mostly a question of who will own the tool. Our judgment: pick Sentry if developers want to debug errors and slow requests in the apps they ship. Pick Datadog if someone owns infrastructure, logs and APM across hosts. Some teams run both, and the two bills behave in opposite ways when you go over budget.
All prices below are list prices read from each vendor's own pages in October 2026. They change, so check the live page before you commit. If you're still choosing the rest of your stack, our hub on hiring developers by tech stack covers the surrounding decisions.
Sentry vs Datadog at a glance
| Factor | Sentry | Datadog |
|---|---|---|
| Built for | Error monitoring and distributed tracing per application | Infrastructure, APM, logs and real user monitoring on one platform |
| Billing unit | Reserved volume of errors, spans, replays and logs per month | Per host, per GB of logs, per million indexed logs, per 1,000 sessions |
| Entry price | Team $29/month monthly, $26/month annual | Infrastructure Pro $15 per host per month annual, $18 month-to-month |
| Seats | Unlimited users on Team, Business and Enterprise | No per-user line on the list prices we read |
| Infrastructure monitoring | Not what it sells | Yes, per infra host |
| Logs | 5 GB included on every plan, then +$0.50/GB | $0.10 per ingested GB, plus indexing per million logs |
| Tracing | 5M spans on every plan | APM at $31 per APM host per month annual |
| Session replay | 50 replays on every plan | RUM at $0.15 per 1,000 sessions annual (full traffic) |
| Error tracking | Core product, 50k errors on Team and Business | Add-on line, from $25 per month annual for the first 50k errors |
| Past your budget | Data is dropped, you aren't charged | Not stated on the pages we read; on-demand rates are listed (our reading: usage keeps billing) |
| Free tier | Developer plan: 5k errors, one user | Up to five Basic infrastructure hosts, 1-day metric retention |
What each tool covers: errors or the whole stack?
They overlap on one feature and differ on everything around it.
Sentry
Sentry's docs describe the setup as adding Sentry error monitoring and distributed tracing to your app. You install an SDK per application, and the unit of work is the issue: a grouped error with a stack trace, the release it came in and the trace around it. That's a developer's tool. The person who got the alert is usually the person who can fix the line of code.
Datadog
Datadog is a platform. Its list prices cover infrastructure hosts, APM hosts, logs, real user monitoring and a separate Error Tracking line. Datadog's Error Tracking docs say it captures and processes errors across web, mobile and backend applications, and that it ingests from your Logs, Traces and Real User Monitoring events. So Datadog does track errors, but it builds them from the other telemetry you already pay for.
We couldn't confirm from Datadog's docs whether Error Tracking is bundled with any other product, so don't assume it's included in APM. The only claim we can stand behind is the separate list price in the table above.
How the pricing units differ: events and spans vs hosts and GB
Sentry sells volume. Datadog sells the things that produce volume. That decides which bill surprises you.
Sentry: plans, quotas and pay-as-you-go
Sentry's pricing page lists Developer (free, 5k errors, one user), Team at $29/month monthly or $26 annual, Business at $89 monthly or $80 annual, and custom Enterprise. Paid plans have unlimited users. Team and Business include 50k errors, 5M spans and 50 replays, and every plan includes 5 GB of logs with +$0.50/GB beyond that.
Past the included volume, you draw on a pay-as-you-go (PAYG) budget. Sentry's pricing docs give example rates for Team: errors from 50k to 100k at $0.0003625 each, spans from 5M to 100M at $0.0000020 each, and replays at $0.0037500 each. Those are tiered rates, so read the docs for the tier you'd actually land in.
Datadog: per host, per GB, per session
Datadog's list prices are per unit per month. Infrastructure Pro is $15 per host annual, $18 month-to-month and $18 on-demand. APM is $31 per host annual and $36 month-to-month or on-demand. Log ingest is $0.10 per GB. Indexed logs with 15-day retention are $1.70 per million annual, $2.04 month-to-month and $2.55 on-demand. RUM is $0.15 per 1,000 sessions annual. Error Tracking is $25 annual, $30 month-to-month and $36 on-demand for the first 50k errors.
Datadog's pricing page lists annual, monthly and hourly plans, and says multi-year and volume discounts are available for large volumes. The annual column is cheapest, but it's a commitment.
A worked example, illustrative only
Take a fictional team: 10 hosts, 100 GB of ingested logs a month, 100,000 errors a month. This is our arithmetic from the list prices above, not a quote or a typical bill.
On Datadog, annual rates: 10 infra hosts at $15 is $150. 10 APM hosts at $31 is $310. 100 GB of log ingest at $0.10 is $10. Add the $25 Error Tracking line for the first 50k errors, and we haven't priced the second 50k because the page we read gives no rate for it. That's $495 before indexed logs or RUM.
On Sentry, Team monthly: $29 plan fee. The 100k errors are 50k included plus 50k at the quoted $0.0003625, which is $18.13. The 100 GB of logs are 5 GB included plus 95 GB at $0.50, which is $47.50. That's about $94.63, with tracing inside the 5M included spans.
The two totals are not comparable. Datadog's includes infrastructure monitoring and APM per host. Sentry's doesn't include any. Compare what each buys, not the figures.
What happens when you hit your limit?
Sentry's docs say: "Any data sent after you've run through your reserved volume and PAYG budget will be dropped and you won't be charged for it." The PAYG budget is shared across categories on a first-come, first-served basis. So a noisy error loop can use the budget that your traces needed. With a PAYG budget set, the bill stays capped, and the cost is missing data, usually during an incident, which is when you want it.
Datadog works the other way. Its list prices carry an on-demand column, for example $18 per infra host and $36 per APM host. We read that as usage continuing to bill past what you committed, at a higher rate than the annual price. Datadog's pages we read don't describe a hard stop, so treat the exposure as bill growth and ask your account contact about caps.
Either way, log volume is where budgets break. We walked through the same pressure in our Cloudflare log and trace pricing piece, where Datadog shows up as a destination at $0.10/GB.
When to run both
This is our judgment, not a benchmark.
The clean split is by owner. Developers get Sentry's issue alerts, because they can act on a stack trace. Ops gets Datadog's host and log dashboards, because they own capacity and uptime. The risk is paying twice for overlapping signals: errors captured in both, traces sent to both, two SDKs in every service. Decide which tool is the system of record for errors before you install the second.
Alerts also need an owner at 3 a.m. Whichever tool pages people, an on-call rotation for a nearshore team has to exist first, or both tools just generate unread notifications.
What this means for your monitoring budget and who owns it
Decide the owner before the vendor. Our judgment: if no one on the team owns infrastructure, Datadog's per-host and per-GB meters will be configured by whoever has time, and that's how bills grow. In that case start with Sentry, where, with a PAYG budget set, the worst case is dropped data and a capped bill.
If you already have someone running hosts and logs, price Datadog on the annual column and get your expected host count and log volume from them, not from a guess. Then ask whether error tracking belongs in Sentry or in Datadog's Error Tracking line, and pick one.
Whichever you pick, set a budget alert on the log meter first. Volume pricing is the same lesson in Cloudflare's per-GB log pricing change, which is the next place to read if logs are your biggest unknown.
Hiring DevOps engineers to run Datadog or an observability stack
A per-host platform needs a person who owns it. HighCircl matches DevOps engineers who pass four vetting stages, and about 1 in 10 applicants get through. You get a shortlist of 3-5 candidates within 72 hours, with no subscription and no recruitment fee. Senior engineer rates run €45-105/hr ($50-115/hr), with a 20% capped margin on top of what the engineer earns. Hire DevOps engineers through HighCircl.
FAQ
Do Sentry and Datadog do the same thing?
Partly. Both track errors and traces. Sentry is built around application errors and per-app SDKs. Datadog adds infrastructure monitoring, logs and real user monitoring, and builds its error tracking from those signals.
Is Sentry cheaper than Datadog?
The entry points favour Sentry: Team is $26/month annual with unlimited users, while Datadog charges per host and per GB. But the units differ, so it depends on hosts, logs and errors you actually produce. Our worked example above shows why the totals aren't a fair comparison. Compare what each buys. If you're weighing another tooling vendor pair, we compared PostHog vs Amplitude the same way.
Does Datadog have error tracking?
Yes. Datadog's docs say Error Tracking captures errors across web, mobile and backend apps from your logs, traces and real user monitoring events. Its list price is $25 per month annual for the first 50k errors. We couldn't confirm whether it's bundled with other products.
Can you run Sentry and Datadog together?
Yes. The split we'd use is Sentry for developer-owned issues and Datadog for host and log monitoring. Watch for duplicated instrumentation and pick one tool as the system of record for errors.
Does Sentry replace Datadog?
No. Sentry's pages we read don't sell infrastructure monitoring or log dashboards across hosts. If you need host-level visibility, Sentry alone won't cover it.