Staxly

Langfuse vs Datadog

Open-source LLM engineering platform — observability, prompts, evals
vs. Enterprise cloud monitoring — infra, APM, logs, RUM, security, LLM

Langfuse websiteDatadog website

Pricing tiers

Langfuse

Hobby (Cloud Free)
Free. 50k units/month included. 30 days data access. 2 users. Community support.
Free
Self-Hosted (OSS)
MIT-licensed. Docker Compose or Kubernetes deployment. Unlimited.
$0 base (usage-based)
Core
$29/month. 100k units included ($8 per 100k overage). 90 days retention. Unlimited users. In-app support.
$29/mo
Pro
$199/month. 100k units included + same overage. 3 YEARS retention. Unlimited annotation queues. High rate limits.
$199/mo
Teams Add-on
+$300/month. Adds Enterprise SSO + fine-grained RBAC + dedicated Slack support to Pro.
$300/mo
Enterprise
$2,499/month. Everything + custom rate limits, uptime SLA, dedicated support engineer. Yearly options.
$2499/mo
Langfuse website

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

Free-tier quotas head-to-head

Comparing hobby on Langfuse vs free on Datadog.

MetricLangfuseDatadog
No overlapping quota metrics for these tiers.

Features

Langfuse · 16 features

  • Annotation QueuesHuman reviewers rate traces. Unlimited on Pro+.
  • DashboardsAggregate metrics, cost, quality across projects.
  • DatasetsCurate test sets from production traces. Run experiments.
  • EU Cloud RegionGDPR-compliant hosting in EU.
  • EvaluationsLLM-as-judge, manual scores, custom model-graded evaluators.
  • LLM Cost TrackingAutomatic cost calculation per provider/model.
  • OpenTelemetry NativeOTel SDK → Langfuse endpoint works out of box.
  • PlaygroundTest prompts + models + variables live.
  • Prompt ManagementVersion, tag, label prompts. Reference from code by label.
  • Public APIFull REST API for ingest, query, prompt management.
  • Python @observe decoratorOne-line decorator to trace any function.
  • Self-HostingDocker Compose + k8s Helm chart.
  • SessionsGroup related traces (conversations, agent runs).
  • TracingCapture every LLM call, tool call, nested span with inputs/outputs/cost.
  • Users TrackingSegment traces by user ID, track per-user cost.
  • WebhooksSubscribe to trace completion events.

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.

Developer interfaces

KindLangfuseDatadog
CLIDatadog Agent
SDKlangfuse-js, langfuse-pythondd-trace-dotnet, dd-trace-go, dd-trace-java, dd-trace-js (RUM), dd-trace (Node), ddtrace (Python), ddtrace (Ruby)
RESTLangfuse REST APIDatadog REST API
MCPLangfuse MCP ServerDatadog MCP
OTHERLangfuse Dashboard, OpenTelemetry endpointOpenTelemetry (OTLP), Webhooks
Staxly is an independent catalog of developer platforms. Outbound links to Langfuse and Datadog are plain references to their official websites. Pricing is verified against vendor pages at publication time — reconfirm before buying.

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