Datadog scales across multiple usage meters and keeps most telemetry in its SaaS data plane. Kloudfuse runs inside your cloud and prices in tiers: pick the band that covers your volume, and the price is fixed inside it.
The biggest differences come down to how the platform is deployed, how usage is priced, and what happens as data volume and complexity grow.
Hosts, APM, log ingest, log indexing, indexed spans and custom metrics are billed separately. As usage grows across more than one dimension, several parts of the bill move at once.
Datadog’s BYOC Logs runs log indexing, storage and query in your cloud account. Infrastructure, APM, RUM, profiling and other signals remain Datadog-hosted, so Datadog still operates the data plane for most of your telemetry.
With Kloudfuse, ingest, storage, query and the AI runtime all run inside your VPC, against your object storage and under your keys.
Datadog’s agent applies head-based sampling out of the box, adaptively targeting roughly ten traces per second across your services. It is overridable with DD_APM_TARGET_TPS and sampling rules; the spans you keep are billed at $1.27 to $2.50 per million.
Datadog cost builds across multiple usage meters. Kloudfuse prices the same telemetry footprint within one fixed ingestion tier.
Multiple parts of the bill can change as the environment grows.
Published list pricing across the meters above, before any negotiated discount.
The platform price stays fixed anywhere inside this band; only infra moves with volume.
Includes the $116,873 Medium platform tier plus modelled cloud infrastructure.
86% lower in this modelled deployment
Explore the Datadog pricing calculator →Representative Medium deployment: about 12 TB/day. Modelled from published list pricing; actual costs vary by usage, configuration and commercial terms.
Where the data plane runs, what each meter charges for, and what each platform will and will not do. Where a vendor does not publish something, the table says so.
| Datadog | Kloudfuse | |
|---|---|---|
| Where it runs | ||
| Data plane location | SaaS. BYOC Logs (GA 2026) runs the log data plane in your own cloud account with Datadog as control plane; Infrastructure, APM, RUM and the rest stay Datadog-hosted. BYOC Logs pricing is not published. | Inside your VPC. Ingest, storage, query engine and the AI runtime all deploy into your own cloud account, writing to your object storage under your keys. Only metadata reaches Kloudfuse. |
| AWS, GCP and Azure | Yes. AWS · GCP · Azure | Yes. AWS · GCP · Azure |
| Drop-in migration from their agent | Not published. Their own agent | Yes. Datadog and OpenTelemetry agents accepted |
| What it costs | ||
| What you are billed on | Ten or more meters, billed independently: hosts for infrastructure and again for APM, log ingest and log indexing as separate charges, indexed spans, custom metrics, RUM sessions, synthetics, and per-seat SKUs for On-Call and Incident Management. | Ingestion tiers. Pick the band that covers your TB/day and the price is fixed inside it. Storage and compute land on your own cloud bill because the platform runs in your account. |
| High cardinality | Historically a custom metric was every unique tag combination, at $5 per 100 above the per-host allowance, with 5–10× multipliers on histograms and distributions. Infinite Cardinality Metrics went GA on 9 June 2026 and prices by metric name instead — but it is opt-in and its rates are contract-defined, not published. | No cardinality premium, no active-series cap, no per-custom-metric charge. Adding a label does not change the bill. |
| Retention | Retention is the indexing tier. Indexed logs run $1.06/M at 3 days to $2.50/M at 30 days — roughly a 2.4× step for keeping data 27 days longer. Flex Storage covers 1–15 months at $0.05 per million events stored. | Your bucket, your lifecycle policy. Long retention is a storage decision rather than a pricing tier. |
| Your data | ||
| Sampling | Head-based trace sampling on by default, targeting ~10 traces/sec. Overridable, at the cost of more indexed spans. | No forced sampling. Full fidelity across metrics, logs, traces, events, RUM and profiles. |
| Every signal in one store | Partly. Separate products, separate meters | Yes. One data lake |
| Log pattern reduction at ingest | Not published. Not published as an ingest control | Yes. Fingerprinting at ingest |
| Works with existing Grafana dashboards | Not published. No first-party datasource | Yes. Kfuse datasource |
| Portability | Datadog supports OpenTelemetry ingest. Dashboards, monitors and notebooks use Datadog-specific formats and require migration when moving platforms. | Built on OpenTelemetry, with Grafana-compatible dashboards through the Kfuse datasource and support for TraceQL and PromQL. Your data stays in your object storage. Your instrumentation and dashboards remain portable and independent of Kloudfuse. |
| AI | ||
| Agents and assistants | Bits AI runs in Datadog’s environment, against data held there. | Dexter runs inside your boundary, on the model you choose, including a local one. Prompts and completions stay inside the boundary. A human stays in control. |
| Inference inside your own boundary | No. Bits AI runs in Datadog | Yes. Dexter runs in your VPC |
| Security and compliance | ||
| Government and regulated | FedRAMP High, authorised 5 May 2026 via the agency path, in a dedicated US1-FED GovCloud environment. DoD IL5 is stated as progress, not authorisation. | The data plane runs inside whatever boundary you have already had authorised. FIPS 140-3 validated cryptography (CMVP #5186, #5209); FedRAMP-targeted installations run with EBS encryption. |
| SOC 2 Type II | Yes. Type II | Yes. Type II |
| HIPAA | Yes. With a BAA | Partly. In progress |
| FIPS-validated cryptography | Partly. 140-2, via the FIPS agent | Yes. 140-3 · CMVP #5186, #5209 |
| Data residency | Partly. Region choice, inside their boundary | Yes. Structural — your own VPC |
YesPartlyNoNot published
Usually not, because the host charge is the floor and it is the largest line for most teams. Custom metrics and indexed spans are what make the bill unpredictable rather than what make it large. Turning them off buys predictability by giving up the visibility you bought the tool for.
For logs, largely yes — indexing, storage and query run in your account against your own object storage. It does not cover infrastructure metrics, APM, RUM or profiling, and Datadog remains the control plane. If your constraint is "no telemetry leaves our boundary," that constraint applies to more than logs.
Kloudfuse accepts the Datadog agent directly, so collection dual-ships from day one with no re-instrumentation and no gap in coverage. Dashboards are the larger piece of work, and Kloudfuse works with your team on dashboard migration during onboarding. Grafana-compatible dashboards run through the Kfuse datasource.
Partly. Infinite Cardinality Metrics went GA on 9 June 2026 and prices by metric name rather than by unique time series. It is opt-in rather than the default, all ingested datapoints now count towards billing under it, and the rates are set in your contract rather than published — so it changes the shape of the problem more than it removes it.
Datadog and Bits AI are trademarks of Datadog, Inc. Kloudfuse is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by Datadog.
Run Kloudfuse against your own telemetry, in your own cloud, and see what a single correlated view does to your mean time to resolution.