# Datadog alternative for Node.js APIs - ApiTraffic vs Datadog

> ApiTraffic vs Datadog for Node.js APIs: one record per request with its queries and firewall verdict, no host agent, and published pricing.

Source: https://dev.apitraffic.io/vs/datadog

ApiTraffic vs Datadog

# ApiTraffic vs Datadog for Node.js APIs

Datadog is a much broader product. ApiTraffic answers one question well: who called your API, and what happened. Here is when each one is the right call.

[Start your free trial](https://dev.app.apitraffic.io/signup?src=vs-datadog)[See pricing](/pricing)

The honest version

## Which one fits

### Choose Datadog if

- **You monitor a whole estate,** not just APIs: Kafka clusters, hosts, containers and forty services on one set of custom dashboards.
- **You need infrastructure monitoring or RUM,** or log ingestion from things that are not your API.

- **You need a very large integration catalog** and APM across many languages from one vendor.

### Choose ApiTraffic if

- **One record per request:** the payload, the queries behind it and the firewall’s verdict, already joined. Nothing to correlate by request ID across three products and three clocks at 2am.
- **No host agent to deploy:** one npm install and one line of middleware. No collector, no sidecar.

- **A firewall in the same middleware,** and API drift detection that flags the deploy that removed a field before a consumer files the bug.
- **Every endpoint judged against its own normal** - last hour and the same hour last week - so a busy endpoint that always throws a few errors does not page you, and a real regression does.

Pricing

## How each one bills

Datadog meters each product separately: per host for infrastructure and APM, and by volume for log ingestion and indexing, each on its own line of the bill.

ApiTraffic has published plans priced by captured requests: logging, APM, alerting and a firewall in one product, with what each plan includes and its overage rate printed on the [pricing page](/pricing).

There is no host agent, so there is no per-host meter and no bill that grows every time you add a container.

Switching

## Running both, or moving over from Datadog

**You do not have to rip anything out.** Add `@apitraffic/node` to one service, let a week of the same traffic land in both, and compare what each one told you.

If Datadog watches your infrastructure, keep it for that. ApiTraffic sits inside the app and records the requests, which is a different job.

## Know what your API did - before your customers tell you.

One npm install and one line of code. Your first requests arrive in minutes, with their queries, their firewall verdict and a baseline for every endpoint already building.

[Start your free trial](https://dev.app.apitraffic.io/signup?src=vs-datadog-closing)

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