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Datadog vs LangSmith
Short answer: Pick Datadog if you want unified observability and security for cloud apps; pick LangSmith if you want LLM app observability. Datadog has a free plan; LangSmith has a free plan, paid from $39/month per user.
DatadogMonitoring and security platform for cloud apps
LangSmithTracing, evals and monitoring for LLM appsWhich to pick
Pick Datadog if you want…
- Unified observability and security for cloud apps
- Full-stack cloud monitoring
- Integrations with Amazon Web Services, Kubernetes or GitHub (on Datadog's list, not LangSmith's)
Pick LangSmith if you want…
- LLM app observability
- Integrations with OpenAI SDK, Anthropic SDK or Vercel AI SDK (on LangSmith's list, not Datadog's)
Side by side
- What it is
- Datadog:Datadog is a cloud monitoring and security platform that provides observability across infrastructure, applications, logs, and security.
- LangSmith:LangSmith provides tracing, monitoring, and evaluation for LLM applications and AI agents.
- Best for
- Datadog:Unified observability and security for cloud apps
- LangSmith:LLM app observability
- Who it’s for
- Datadog:Developers, IT ops, and security teams managing cloud-native workloads.
- LangSmith:Developers and teams building LLM-based agents and applications.
- Pricing
- Datadog:Freemium
- LangSmith:Freemium
- Starting price
- Datadog:—
- LangSmith:$39/month per user (Plus)
- Free plan or trial
- Datadog:Free trial
- LangSmith:Free plan (Developer)
- Plans
- Datadog:AI Credits $500 per 500 credits per month · Code Coverage $8 per committer per month · Log Management $0.10 per GB ingested per month
- LangSmith:Developer $0 per seat per month · Plus $39 per seat per month
- Works with
- Datadog:Amazon Web Services, Kubernetes, OpenTelemetry, GitHub, GitLab, Azure DevOps
- LangSmith:OpenAI SDK, Anthropic SDK, Vercel AI SDK, LlamaIndex, OpenTelemetry, LangChain
Datadog features
- Infrastructure Monitoring. Collects metrics, custom metrics, and alerts from servers, containers, and cloud services.
- Application Performance Monitoring. Tracks request latency, traces, and provides continuous profiling.
- Log Management. Ingests, parses, enriches and stores logs with flexible retention and alerting.
- Security Suite. Offers code security, vulnerability management, cloud security posture and SIEM.
- Synthetic & Real User Monitoring. Proactively tests user journeys and captures real-user performance data.
- AI-powered Bits Suite. AI agents for chat, investigation, code fixes, and custom workflow automation.
LangSmith features
- Tracing SDKs. Native tracing for popular agent frameworks via Python, TypeScript, Go, and Java SDKs.
- Real-time Monitoring. Dashboards show latency, cost, token usage and support alerts via webhooks or PagerDuty.
- Insights & Clustering. Unsupervised topic clustering and error-analysis templates automatically surface usage patterns.
- SmithDB Query Engine. Purpose-built database for fast, random-access queries, full-text search and JSON-path filtering.
- Self-hosted Options. Managed cloud, BYOC, or fully self-hosted deployments keep data inside your VPC.
- Online Eval as LLM-as-Judge. Run code and response evaluations in real time to score quality.
- Cost Tracking. Track token usage and LSUs, with pay-as-you-go pricing per trace volume.
- Alert Integrations. Webhook and PagerDuty alerts trigger on custom metric thresholds.
Datadog vs LangSmith FAQ
What is the difference between Datadog and LangSmith?+
Datadog offers broad cloud-app observability but lacks built-in LLM agent tracing and eval features.
Should I use Datadog or LangSmith?+
Pick Datadog if you want unified observability and security for cloud apps, full-stack cloud monitoring or integrations with Amazon Web Services, Kubernetes or GitHub (on Datadog's list, not LangSmith's). Pick LangSmith if you want LLM app observability or integrations with OpenAI SDK, Anthropic SDK or Vercel AI SDK (on LangSmith's list, not Datadog's).
Is Datadog or LangSmith free?+
Datadog has a free plan and paid plans. LangSmith has a free plan (Developer); paid plans start at $39/month per user (Plus).
Do Datadog and LangSmith integrate with the same tools?+
Partly. Both list OpenTelemetry. Datadog also lists Amazon Web Services, Kubernetes, GitHub, GitLab and 1 more; LangSmith also lists OpenAI SDK, Anthropic SDK, Vercel AI SDK, LlamaIndex and 1 more.
On DevHunt
Based on each tool's website and DevHunt data. Details may change; check the official sites.