Checkly vs Datadog Synthetic Monitoring

From $24 per month (Starter; Team is $64)

From $5 per 10k API test runs (browser tests are $12 per 1k)

Priced by check runs; browser checks cost more than API checks, and frequency multiplies the bill. Team at $64 adds 75 monitors, 30-second frequency, all 22 locations and private locations.

Note the different units: Datadog bills API tests per ten thousand runs and browser tests per thousand, so browser tests are roughly 24x the unit cost. A test run is one execution from one location, so multi-location checks multiply. Costs land inside a wider Datadog contract that is rarely small.

Hobby: 10 uptime monitors, 10k API and 1k browser check runs a month across 6 locations.

14-day trial.

Widely used

Checkly · since 2018

Category standard

Datadog · since 2019

• One Playwright script serves as both an E2E test and a production monitor.
• Monitoring-as-code fits GitOps workflows and code review.
• Excellent developer experience and clear, published pricing.

• Correlation with APM traces and logs makes root-cause analysis dramatically faster.
• Private locations let you monitor internal services behind the firewall.
• Recorded browser tests are authorable by people who do not write code.

• Playwright-centric; teams on other frameworks get less benefit.
• Browser checks at high frequency across many locations get expensive.
• Not a full observability platform — no APM or log management.

• Only worth it if you are already a Datadog customer; standalone it is expensive.
• Datadog billing complexity is a well-known source of budget surprises.
• The recorder produces tests that are harder to version and review than code.

Engineering teams already using Playwright who want production journeys monitored.

Existing Datadog customers who want monitoring in the same pane as their observability data.