Head-to-head, indicative as of Oct 2026. Prices change — always confirm on the vendor page.
Quick read: pick Datadog if your workload is unified metrics, logs, traces at scale and its pricing model fits your traffic shape; pick AWS App Runner if you need containers on aws without touching ecs/eks. For anything latency-sensitive at the edge, cold start row is the tiebreaker.
| Datadog | AWS App Runner | |
|---|---|---|
| Type | Observability platform | Container PaaS |
| Free tier | 2 hosts trial | None |
| Paid pricing (indicative) | From ~$15/host/mo (infra), modules priced separately | vCPU + memory per second, scale to zero |
| Egress | n/a (SaaS) | Metered |
| Cold start | n/a | Seconds from zero |
| Regions | Global SaaS | AWS regions |
| Best for | Unified metrics, logs, traces at scale | Containers on AWS without touching ECS/EKS |
Try Datadog Try AWS App Runner
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