Vigil vs Datadog
Updated · prices checked September 2026
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, from $19/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 ($36 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 $5 per 10,000 runs ($7.20 on-demand), browser tests $12 per 1,000 runs ($18 on-demand). A check every minute from one location is about 43,000 runs a month.
- RUM: $0.15 per 1,000 sessions. 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: 20 monitors at 5-minute checks, 1 server, 1 status page, 3 team members, 7 days of history, Telegram/Slack/Discord alerts. Commercial use allowed. Free forever.
- Starter $19/month: 50 monitors at 1-minute intervals, 3 servers, 3 status pages, unlimited team members, 30 days of history.
- Pro $49/month: 200 monitors at 1-minute intervals, 15 servers, unlimited team members, 10 status pages with custom domain, password and white-label, 2,000,000 log lines, 5 Kubernetes clusters, RUM, 150 AI analyses, 90 days of history.
- Business $149/month: 1,000 monitors, 100 servers, unlimited team members, 10 identity providers (SSO, SAML, SCIM), 10 private locations, 1-year history.
- Every feature, including SSO, SLOs and private locations, is on every plan; the plans differ only in numbers.
- New accounts start on a 14-day Pro trial with no card, then stay on Free unless you choose a plan. Yearly billing gets 2 months free, no overage charges.
- Self-hosted $149/month per instance on your own server or air-gapped network.
- Add-ons on paid plans from $4: +50 monitors ($5), +5 servers ($5), +5 status pages ($4), +1M log lines ($4).
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 $49 Pro plan unless stated.
| Vigil | Datadog | |
|---|---|---|
| Uptime / API monitors and fastest interval | ✓ 20 Free (5-minute checks) / 50 Starter / 200 Pro / 1,000 Business. 1-minute checks on paid plans, 12 monitor types (Uptime, API check, API flow, Browser check, Heartbeat, TCP port, Domain & DNS, App health, Dependency, Content change, Price / number, Keyword) | ✓ Synthetic API and browser tests, many regions, billed per run |
| Servers (infrastructure agent) | ✓ 1 / 3 / 15 / 100 servers included. Single-file agent for Linux and macOS, PowerShell agent for Windows: CPU, memory, disks, network, processes, services, Docker, packages, vulnerabilities, disk forecasts | ✓ The agent is the industry standard. $15–23 per host per month |
| Logs | ✓ 10k / 250k / 2M / 10M 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 | ~ Any OpenTelemetry SDK can send traces, metrics and logs over OTLP; Vigil's own lightweight SDKs cover Python and Node. Endpoints with p95 and Apdex, stored slow traces, slow queries, N+1 detection, service map. Not a full APM suite: no profiling | ✓ Full distributed tracing, profiling, error tracking in every language. $31+ per host |
| Kubernetes | ✓ 1 cluster on Free and Starter, 5 on Pro, unlimited on Business. 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, 2 sites / 100k views Starter, 10 sites / 1M views Pro, 50 sites / 10M views Business | ✓ 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 and custom CSS on every plan including Free; white-label on paid plans. 1 / 3 / 10 / 50 pages | ✕ No customer-facing status pages |
| Team seats | ✓ 3 on Free, unlimited on every paid plan. Owner / admin / member / viewer roles | ✓ Unlimited users at no charge |
| Alert channels (incl. Telegram) | ✓ Telegram, Slack, Discord, Teams, Google Chat, Matrix, ntfy, Gotify, Pushover, webhooks (HMAC, templates), email, phone push. Tickets to PagerDuty, Opsgenie, Jira, ServiceNow, Zendesk (1 ticketing channel on Free, more on paid plans). No SMS or phone calls on the hosted service; the self-hosted edition pages by SMS and call through your own Twilio account | ✓ Every channel including PagerDuty, Slack, Teams, webhooks; Telegram via webhook |
| Self-hosted option | ✓ Full product on your server or air-gapped network, $149/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 / 30 / 150 / 1,000 analyses a month | ✓ Bits AI and Watchdog anomaly detection across the platform |
| Small team: 3 servers, 50 monitors, 5 people | ✓ $19/month on Starter (3 servers, 50 monitors, unlimited team members included) | Infrastructure alone is 3 × $15 = $45/month; add APM ($31/host), logs by volume and 50 synthetic API checks every minute (about 2.2 million runs, about $1,080 at $5 per 10k). Realistically several hundred dollars a month, more with 1-minute synthetics |
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
Limits of Datadog that Vigil does not have:
- 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
- Browser checks use a short line-by-line script run in headless Chromium (with screenshots), not full Playwright test code kept in git.
- No SMS or phone-call alerting on the hosted service (the self-hosted edition can page by SMS and call through your own Twilio account); hosted alerts go to chat apps, phone push, email, webhooks and ticketing tools.
- On-call is simple: rotations, overrides, escalation and acknowledgements, without the scheduling depth of PagerDuty or incident.io.
- Vigil's own APM SDKs are Python and Node; other languages send traces through any OpenTelemetry SDK over OTLP. There is no profiling, and 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 own lightweight SDKs (Python and Node) and any OpenTelemetry SDK over OTLP give endpoint latency, error rates, stored traces, slow queries and a service map. That is enough to see which endpoint is slow and which downstream call caused it. It is not Datadog APM: no profiling, far fewer integrations.
How much would a 3-server team pay on each?
Vigil Starter: $19/month for 3 servers and 50 monitors, everything included (Pro is $49 for 15 servers). 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: every new account gets 14 days of Pro, no card. When the trial ends the account stays on Free (20 monitors) unless you choose a plan, and everything you set up stays.
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