Which is better for my Nonprofit organization: Datadog or New Relic?
In this post we’re going to compare the key features between each platform and show you precisely how these two platforms vary and are different from one another for Nonprofit customers! Because although they both do “Observability” they do different things! So we’ve made it easy for you to review and see what are the key features you need for your Nonprofits Observability needs.
1. Core focus of the platform? —winner: Tie
Datadog’s main focus is cloud security and monitoring. Whereas, New Relic on the other hand is more focused on Application Performance Monitoring (APM). New Relic splits their monitoring tools into three core categories: i. Mobile, ii. Synthetics, and iii. Browser monitoring, each a tool on its own. Visibility and analytics without the hassle. Detect anomalies, discover root causes, and optimize performance across your distributed environment. With APM you can deploy, monitor, and scale services with confidence. And you get as a qualified Nonprofit customer with our Observability for Good program two users and 1000GB per month of data ingest completely free!
2. UI design and ease of use? — winner: New Relic
New Relic in recent months has launched a tonne of new UI features in the first half of 2023 which has taken the platform from a very busy and at times confusing interface, perhaps even engineered, to a powerful well designed toolbox of 20+ core tools. That all seamlessly allow you to troubleshoot, debug, and optimize on one platform. New Relic also has heavily invested in AI into it’s platform, which is likely to be a great super handy feature for new users learning the platform. New Relic’s new UI is faster and more adaptable, making it easier than ever to use data to build better software. the enhanced user interface includes:
- Intuitive navigation: Get to your data faster with simple and consistent navigation across the entire platform.
- Easier instrumentation: Immediately access hundreds of data sources, pre-built dashboards, alert configurations, and custom applications that help you monitor your stack from the Add data button in the sidebar navigation.
- Full customization: Personalize your experience by pinning the features you use most to the new navigation.
- Default system health-at-a-glance: Instant visibility of all of your services in one place with throughput, response rate, and error rate under the new All entities option.
- More room for data: Declutter your workspace by collapsing the side menu so you can see more of your data at a glance.
Datadog’s UI is simple, cleanly designed and straight forward. It is easy to use and understand. It is not at all cluttered, maybe even a tad too minimalistic, the layout is clear and probably very easy to get started on as a beginner.
3. Integrations? — winner: New Relic
New Relic is the clear winner when it comes to easily integrating your tech stack with New Relic, having over 650+ integrations, the most popular being: Tomcat, .Net, Java, JFrog, CoreDNS (Prometheus), Etcd. Datadog has 600 integrations. Integrations are really important because they allow you to bring together all of the metrics and logs from your infrastructure and gain insight into the system as a whole.
4. Freemium model? — winner: New Relic
New Relic offers a free forever tier full access account to test year round. This is actually pretty great because let’s be real, moinitoring and managing your tech infrastructure is a forever changing beast and it’s nice to gave something on-hand for free, that can help you in a jam or when something really goes down and you need a quick fix ASAP.
If you are a nonprofit organization, looking to level up your Observability tools, sign up for a free nonprofit account here:
https://newrelic.com/social-impact/signup
New Relic offers free tools and full platform features along with 1TB of free monthly data injest and 5 user accounts to all qualifying global nonprofit customers! Just email us at hgruber(at)newrelic(dot)com to find out more!
5) Pricing — winner: New Relic
New Relic offers a super generous free subscription tier, offering two full platform users and 1000GBs of ingested data for qualifying nonprofits. This tier can be elevated to a Pro subscription with additional data or users. To get more enterprise-standard tools like SAML SSO, SLA, and Advanced admin capabilities, you’d need to subscribe to PRO or Enterprise tiers. In summary, New Relic’s pricing strategy is based on data, where you pay $0.30/GB for anything above the 100GB cap and the number and type of users. Datadog on the other hand has a decentralized pricing model, each product has its own pricing logic. Datadog has no full-platform pricing publicly advertised, which is really difficult if you are trying to budget, it’s arranged with their sales team, with the option of volume discounts.
6) Community reviews — winner: New Relic
In many Reddit reviews, the free New Relic subscription model is mentioned countless times as being the best positive about getting started with New Relic. Some of the not so kind community reviews of New Relic online mention that users found the UI & UX overwhelming with a challenging learning curve.
For Datadog’s positive online community reviews, customers discussed a wide range of integrations and the convenience of monitoring everything from one spot. Datadog’s customers online mostly expressed disfavor with issues related to pricing, documentation, and technical support.
Sources: https://betterstack.com/community/comparisons/datadog-vs-newrelic/
