Vigil vs Datadog
Datadog is the deepest observability platform there is, and for a platform team it is worth every dollar. Vigil is not that. Vigil gives a small team the 80% they actually use, uptime, servers, logs, Kubernetes, RUM, status pages and AI root cause, for $10/month flat, with no per-host, per-GB or per-run meters.
Datadog pricing September 2026
- Infrastructure: Free up to 5 hosts with 1-day retention. Pro $15 per host per month ($18 on-demand). Enterprise $23 per host per month ($27 on-demand).
- APM: $31 per host per month bundled with Infrastructure ($48 on-demand); APM Pro $35, APM Enterprise $40.
- Log Management: $0.10 per ingested GB plus $1.70 per million indexed events per month ($2.55 on-demand).
- Synthetic Monitoring: API tests billed per 10,000 test runs and browser tests per 1,000 runs (see their pricing page for the current rate; a check every minute from one location is about 43,000 runs a month).
- RUM: billed per 1,000 sessions (see their pricing page). Users are free.
Source: as of September 2026, from datadoghq.com/pricing (annual-commitment prices; on-demand is higher). Vendors change prices; the Datadog site is authoritative.
Vigil pricing
- Free: 10 monitors, 1 server, 1 status page, 7 days of history, Telegram/Slack/Discord alerts. Free forever.
- Pro $10/month: 100 monitors at 1-minute intervals, 5 servers, 5 seats, 5 status pages with custom domain, password and white-label, 1M log lines, 3 Kubernetes clusters, RUM, 100 AI analyses. 10-day trial, no card.
- Enterprise $25/month: 500 monitors, 50 servers, unlimited seats, SSO, SLOs, private locations, 1-year history. 30-day trial.
- Self-hosted $49/month per instance on your own server or air-gapped network.
- Add-ons from $2: +25 monitors, +5 servers ($3), +5 seats, +5 status pages, +1M log lines.
Flat monthly prices, no per-host, per-GB or per-run meters. Full plan matrix.
Feature and price comparison
✓ included · ~ partial or paid add-on · ✕ not offered. Vigil figures are for the $10 Pro plan unless stated.
| Vigil | Datadog | |
|---|---|---|
| Uptime / API monitors and fastest interval | ✓ 10 Free / 100 Pro / 500 Enterprise. 1-minute checks on paid plans, 11 monitor types (uptime, API assertions, multi-step flows, heartbeats, TCP, domain/DNS, app health, dependency, change, price, keyword) | ✓ Synthetic API and browser tests, many regions, billed per run |
| Servers (infrastructure agent) | ✓ 1 / 5 / 50 servers included. Single-file agent for Linux and macOS: CPU, memory, disks, network, processes, services, Docker, packages, vulnerabilities, disk forecasts | ✓ The agent is the industry standard. $15–23 per host per month |
| Logs | ✓ 100k / 1M / 5M lines included. File and journald shipping, full-text search, live tail, log-alert rules | ✓ Best-in-class, $0.10/GB ingested + $1.70 per million indexed events |
| APM / traces | ~ Endpoint latency and 5xx rates, request traces and a service map through the agent's Python and Node SDKs. Not a full APM: no profiling, no distributed tracing across other languages | ✓ Full distributed tracing, profiling, error tracking in every language. $31+ per host |
| Kubernetes | ✓ 3 clusters on Pro, unlimited on Enterprise. DaemonSet manifest; incidents for CrashLoopBackOff, OOMKilled, NotReady, pressure | ✓ Deep Kubernetes monitoring and container maps (containers billed on top of hosts) |
| Real User Monitoring | ✓ Web Vitals p75, page views, JS errors. 1 site Free, 5 sites / 500k views Pro, 50 sites / 5M views Enterprise | ✓ Sessions, session replay, Web Vitals, error tracking, billed per 1,000 sessions |
| Status pages: private, custom domain, white-label | ✓ Private by default, password or private-link sharing, custom domain with automatic HTTPS, white-label and custom CSS on Pro. 1 / 5 / 50 pages | ✕ No customer-facing status pages |
| Team seats | ✓ 1 Free, 5 Pro, unlimited Enterprise. Owner / admin / member / viewer roles, +5 seats for $2 | ✓ Unlimited users at no charge |
| Alert channels (incl. Telegram) | ✓ Telegram, Slack, Discord, Teams, Google Chat, Matrix, ntfy, Gotify, Pushover, webhooks (HMAC, templates), email. Tickets to PagerDuty, Opsgenie, Jira, ServiceNow, Zendesk on paid plans. No SMS or phone calls | ✓ Every channel including PagerDuty, Slack, Teams, webhooks; Telegram via webhook |
| Self-hosted option | ✓ Full product on your server or air-gapped network, $49/month per instance, one-line installer, signed releases | ✕ SaaS only |
| AI incident analysis | ✓ One-click root cause, fix and postmortem draft from the incident's evidence. 5 / 100 / 500 analyses a month | ✓ Bits AI and Watchdog anomaly detection across the platform |
| Small team: 3 servers, 50 monitors, 5 people | ✓ $10/month on Pro (5 servers, 100 monitors, 5 seats included) | Infrastructure alone is 3 × $15 = $45/month; add APM ($31/host), logs by volume and 50 synthetic checks every minute (about 2.2 million runs) billed per 10k runs. Realistically several hundred dollars a month |
Small-team estimate uses public list prices and the cheapest tier that covers 3 servers, 50 monitors at 1-minute intervals and 5 people. Where a vendor meters by run, GB or hour we show the arithmetic so you can redo it with your own numbers.
What Datadog does well
- Unmatched depth: 800+ integrations, distributed tracing in every major language, profiling, security, cloud cost, and dashboards that can do anything.
- Everything correlates: a trace links to its logs, host metrics and the deployment that caused it.
- Enterprise-grade access control, compliance and support.
Where Vigil is ahead
- Every product is a separate SKU with its own meter: hosts, GB, events, runs, sessions. Bills are hard to predict and famously grow.
- Synthetic checks are billed per run; a 1-minute uptime check is 43,000 runs a month before you add locations.
- No status pages for your customers.
- Serious operational overhead for a 3-person team; you need someone to own the Datadog setup.
When to pick Datadog instead
Pick Datadog if you run many services and need distributed tracing and profiling, if you have a platform team that will maintain dashboards and integrations, if you need compliance certifications and enterprise support, or if browser-level synthetic tests are essential.
What Vigil does not do
- No browser / Playwright checks: Vigil scripts APIs, not clicks in a real browser.
- No SMS or phone-call alerting; alerts go to chat apps, push services, email, webhooks and ticketing tools.
- No on-call rotations or schedules: escalation policies and acknowledgements only.
- APM covers Python and Node apps on hosts running the agent; it is not a substitute for a full APM suite.
- Checks run from Vigil's servers plus private locations you host; there is no menu of dozens of public regions.
Moving from Datadog to Vigil
1. Export what you have
List your Datadog monitors (their API or UI export). You need a name, URL or host, interval and the expected status or keyword for each.
2. Apply as code
Write them as Vigil's YAML and apply with PUT /api/v1/config; the same endpoint exports everything back, so monitors can live in git. Or create them one by one through the REST API (monitors, incidents, maintenance, deploy markers).
3. Reconnect alerts
Add Telegram, Slack, Discord, Teams, ntfy, Pushover, email or webhook channels; set escalation to a second channel set. Point your cron jobs at the new heartbeat URLs and install the server agent with one command.
Run both side by side during the trial: Vigil's alert ingestion accepts Alertmanager and Grafana-style webhooks, so existing alerts can appear on a Vigil status page while you move over.
Frequently asked
Can Vigil replace Datadog?
For a small team running a handful of servers, a Kubernetes cluster and some web apps: usually yes, for host metrics, logs, uptime, heartbeats, Kubernetes health, Web Vitals and alerting. For distributed tracing across many services, profiling or hundreds of integrations: no.
How does Vigil's APM compare?
Vigil's agent collects endpoint latency, error rates, request traces and a service map from Python and Node apps on the same host. That is enough to see which endpoint is slow and which downstream call caused it. It is not Datadog APM.
How much would a 3-server team pay on each?
Vigil Pro: $10/month, everything included. Datadog: $45/month for infrastructure at the Pro tier, plus APM at $31 per host, plus logs by volume, plus synthetic runs, each on its own meter. Actual Datadog bills for small teams commonly land in the hundreds.
Can I keep Datadog for tracing and use Vigil for uptime and status pages?
Yes. Vigil can also open tickets in Datadog from its incidents, and its alert ingestion endpoint accepts Alertmanager and Grafana-style webhooks, so you can route Datadog monitors to a Vigil status page.
Try Vigil next to Datadog
Start free: 10-day Pro trial, no card. Everything you set up stays on the Free plan when the trial ends.
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