Our take
Pick AppSignal if app teams who will stay on Free at $0 (30K requests, 1 GB logs, 5-day retention) while they open a first disk graph, then buy the paid APM tile at $23.25 / month billed yearly ($279 / year, 250K requests) when they outgrow the free bucket. Pick Datadog if ops / app teams who will stay on Infrastructure Free (up to 5 hosts) while they open a first Trace Explorer list, then buy Infra Pro at $15 /
Best for
AppSignal Errors, traces, and host gauges you start at $0
Datadog Spans you search at a public $
Free plan
AppSignal No free plan
Datadog No free plan
Lowest paid
AppSignal Long-term log storage $89
Datadog Infrastructure Pro $15
Next step up
AppSignal Application monitoring (yearly tile) $279
Datadog APM (standalone) $36/mo yearly
Runs where
AppSignal Hosted
Datadog Hosted
Watch out
AppSignal Free is 30K requests / month and 5-day retention
Datadog $15 is per host, not a seat
Last checked
AppSignal 2026-10-23 · appsignal.com
Datadog 2026-10-23 · datadoghq.com/pricing
app teams who will stay on Free at $0 (30K requests, 1 GB logs, 5-day retention) while they open a first disk graph, then buy the paid APM tile at $23.25 / month billed yearly ($279 / year, 250K requests) when they outgrow the free bucket.
Read the AppSignal pageops / app teams who will stay on Infrastructure Free (up to 5 hosts) while they open a first Trace Explorer list, then buy Infra Pro at $15 / host / month when they need longer retention — and APM at $36 / host / month standalone when they instrument traces.
Read the Datadog page
