Staxly

Datadog vs LangSmith

Enterprise cloud monitoring — infra, APM, logs, RUM, security, LLM
vs. LLM observability, testing & evaluation — by LangChain

Datadog websiteLangSmith website

Pricing tiers

Datadog

Serverless Monitoring
$0.13 per month per 1M invocations.
$0 base (usage-based)
Free
Up to 5 hosts, 1-day metric retention. Community edition of Agent.
Free
Logs Ingestion
$0.10 per ingested/scanned GB per month.
$0 base (usage-based)
Logs Standard Index
$1.70 per million log events/month.
$0 base (usage-based)
Logs Flex Storage
$0.05 per million events stored/month.
$0 base (usage-based)
Infra Pro
Per host per month (annual billing). 15-month metric retention, 500+ integrations.
$15/mo
Infra Enterprise
Per host. Advanced features, Network Flow Monitoring.
$23/mo
APM
Per host (with Infra attached). Distributed tracing.
$31/mo
APM Pro
Per host. Continuous Profiler + Data Streams Monitoring.
$35/mo
APM Enterprise
Per host. App & API Protection + more.
$40/mo
Enterprise
Volume discounts, dedicated CSM, regional data residency.
Custom
Datadog website

LangSmith

Developer (Free)
Free forever. 5,000 traces/month. 14-day retention. 1 seat. Basic evaluations.
Free
Plus
$39/seat/month. 10k base traces included ($2.50 per 1k overage). Full evaluations, custom dashboards, email support.
$39/mo
Enterprise
Custom. Self-host option, SSO, custom retention, dedicated support.
Custom
LangSmith website

Free-tier quotas head-to-head

Comparing free on Datadog vs developer on LangSmith.

MetricDatadogLangSmith
No overlapping quota metrics for these tiers.

Features

Datadog · 19 features

  • APMDistributed tracing + service catalog + code hotspots.
  • Application SecurityRuntime attack detection, threat intelligence, IAST.
  • CI VisibilityTest + pipeline performance analytics.
  • Cloud SIEMSecurity events correlation, detection rules, audit trails.
  • Continuous ProfilerAlways-on CPU, memory, lock profiling in production.
  • DashboardsPre-built + custom dashboards.
  • Database MonitoringSlow query detection for Postgres, MySQL, Mongo, Oracle, SQL Server.
  • Incident ManagementBuilt-in incident response with postmortems.
  • Infrastructure MonitoringHost, container, k8s metrics. 700+ integrations. Live process + container maps.
  • LLM ObservabilityOpenAI, Anthropic, etc. trace + cost + prompt eval.
  • Log ManagementIngest any logs, structured or raw. Pipelines, parsing, archives to S3.
  • MonitorsAnomaly, forecast, outlier, composite monitors.
  • Network Performance MonitoringPacket-level analysis, flow monitoring.
  • NotebooksRunbook-style dashboards with queries + docs.
  • Real User MonitoringFrontend performance, JS errors, user sessions, Core Web Vitals.
  • Serverless MonitoringAWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, Azure Functions observability.
  • Service CatalogService inventory with ownership + documentation.
  • SyntheticsSynthetic HTTP + browser tests, API tests, mobile tests.
  • Workflow AutomationNo-code workflows triggered by events.

LangSmith · 14 features

  • AlertsThreshold alerts on latency, cost, eval metrics.
  • Annotation QueuesHuman-review workflows for trace quality rating.
  • Custom DashboardsAggregate metrics dashboards per project/tag.
  • DatasetsCollect examples → use as eval sets or training data.
  • EvaluationsLLM-as-judge, embedding similarity, custom Python evaluators, offline batch eval
  • LangChain IntegrationAuto-trace any LangChain/LangGraph run with env var.
  • LangGraph IntegrationFirst-class trace + eval for LangGraph agents.
  • LLM TracingAutomatic trace every LLM call + tool call + chain step.
  • OpenTelemetry ExportExport traces as OTLP to Datadog/Honeycomb/etc.
  • PlaygroundTest prompts + models inline before deploying.
  • Prompt CanvasVisual prompt editor with live test + eval.
  • Prompt HubPublic + private prompt library with versioning.
  • Self-Hosted (Enterprise)Docker + k8s deployment in your infra.
  • Threads + SessionsGroup traces into conversational sessions.

Developer interfaces

KindDatadogLangSmith
CLIDatadog AgentLangSmith CLI
SDKdd-trace-dotnet, dd-trace-go, dd-trace-java, dd-trace-js (RUM), dd-trace (Node), ddtrace (Python), ddtrace (Ruby)langsmith-js, langsmith-python
RESTDatadog REST APILangSmith REST API
MCPDatadog MCPLangSmith MCP
OTHEROpenTelemetry (OTLP), WebhooksLangSmith Dashboard
Staxly is an independent catalog of developer platforms. Outbound links to Datadog and LangSmith are plain references to their official websites. Pricing is verified against vendor pages at publication time — reconfirm before buying.

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