Datadog vs Plausible for Solo Developers

Quick Comparison

Datadog Overview

Datadog is the enterprise observability platform that monitors your infrastructure, applications, and services. It tracks server metrics, application performance, log data, database queries, container health, network traffic, and more. It's designed for DevOps teams managing complex distributed systems at scale.

For solo developers, Datadog presents a familiar dilemma. It's the best tool in its category, but it's built for teams with dedicated DevOps engineers and monitoring budgets. The per-host, per-feature pricing adds up quickly, and the sheer number of features creates a steep learning curve. I've seen solo developers set up Datadog, get overwhelmed, and then never actually use it to debug anything.

Plausible Overview

Plausible is a lightweight, privacy-focused web analytics tool. It tells you how many people visit your site, which pages they view, where they come from, and what devices they use. No cookies. No personal data collection. No consent banners. GDPR compliant by default.

The entire dashboard fits on one screen. That's not a limitation, it's the point. You open Plausible, you see your traffic numbers, referral sources, top pages, and geographic data in about three seconds. Compare that to Google Analytics where finding your pageview count requires navigating through four menus.

I use Plausible on all my sites. At $9/month for the cloud version (or free if you self-host), it's the most obvious "just add it" tool in my stack.

Key Differences

These tools solve entirely different problems. Datadog monitors your servers and applications. Is your API slow? Is your database connection pool maxed out? Is your server running out of memory? That's Datadog territory. Plausible monitors your website traffic. How many visitors today? Which blog post is trending? Where are people coming from? That's Plausible territory.

There is almost zero overlap between these tools. Datadog's RUM (Real User Monitoring) feature touches on some web analytics concepts like page load times and user sessions, but it's not designed as an analytics tool. Plausible has no concept of server health, application errors, or infrastructure metrics.

Audience. Datadog is for backend engineers and DevOps people who need to keep infrastructure healthy. Plausible is for anyone who wants to understand their website traffic without the complexity of Google Analytics.

Pricing alignment with solo developers. Plausible's $9/month for 10k pageviews matches solo developer needs perfectly. Datadog's pricing model starts making sense at the team level when you're managing multiple services and need coordinated observability. For solo developers, even Datadog's free tier feels like using a crane to hang a picture frame.

Privacy. Plausible is privacy-first. No cookies, no tracking scripts that follow users across the internet, no data sold to advertisers. Datadog collects operational data about your infrastructure, which is a different privacy concern. But if GDPR compliance for user-facing analytics is important to you, Plausible solves that problem entirely.

Setup time. Plausible is a single script tag. You add one line to your HTML and you're done. Datadog requires server agents, SDK installations, and configuration. There's no comparison in terms of time-to-value.

When to Choose Datadog

• You need infrastructure monitoring for servers, containers, and databases
• Application performance monitoring and distributed tracing are required
• You're managing complex backend systems that need observability
• You have the budget and need enterprise-grade monitoring
• Your primary concern is application health, not website traffic metrics

When to Choose Plausible

• You need simple, privacy-focused website traffic analytics
• You want to replace Google Analytics with something that respects user privacy
• Understanding traffic sources, top pages, and visitor trends is your goal
• You want setup in under a minute with a single script tag
• GDPR compliance without cookie consent banners matters to you

The Verdict

These tools aren't competitors, so "choosing" between them doesn't quite apply. If you need infrastructure monitoring, Datadog (or its simpler alternatives like BetterStack or Grafana) is what you're looking for. If you need web analytics, Plausible is what you want.

That said, as a solo developer, I'd set up Plausible long before I'd set up Datadog. Understanding your traffic is immediately actionable. You see which content performs, which referral sources work, and whether your marketing efforts are paying off. That directly impacts your business decisions.

Infrastructure monitoring becomes important once you have users depending on your app being up and fast. For many solo developers, simpler tools like BetterStack's uptime monitoring or a basic Grafana setup cover the infrastructure side without Datadog's complexity.

So the real answer is this. Use Plausible for analytics (it's cheap, simple, and privacy-friendly). Use something simpler than Datadog for monitoring (unless you genuinely have the infrastructure complexity that demands it). Both problems are real, but they need different tools.