# Ivy vs Datadog Serverless

Ivy is a focused, open-source alternative to Datadog Serverless Monitoring for teams that mainly need AWS Lambda traces with payloads and error groups. Datadog is a full observability platform with logs, metrics, infrastructure, many runtimes and mature alerting. Ivy does less, costs much less per invocation, and can be self-hosted.

## Feature comparison

As of November 2026, from Datadog's public pricing and product pages.

| Feature | Ivy | Datadog Serverless |
|---|---|---|
| Scope | Lambda traces, errors and alerts | Full platform: APM, logs, metrics, infrastructure, RUM, security and more |
| Lambda runtimes | Node.js (others through OTLP) | Most Lambda runtimes |
| Instrumentation | One layer, attached by opt-in auto-trace rules | Datadog Lambda extension and libraries, with several install methods |
| Payloads | Events, responses, AWS SDK and HTTP bodies by default, redacted in the function | Available, configurable |
| Failures outside the handler | Init errors, out of memory, crashes, timeouts, throttles | Enhanced Lambda metrics and logs |
| Alerting | Slack per error group, weekly digest | Monitors on any metric, log or trace, many integrations |
| Agents | MCP server across workspaces, MCP Apps views, HTTP API with OpenAPI | MCP server (generally available since March 2026) |
| Open source and self-hosting | Yes (MIT), `docker compose up` | No |

**Where Datadog is stronger:** breadth. If you need logs, metrics, dashboards, monitors on everything, many runtimes and one vendor for all of it, Datadog does far more than Ivy.

**Where Ivy is stronger:** a small, predictable bill for Lambda tracing, payloads on by default, failures outside the handler as first-class traces, an open-source codebase you can run yourself, and setup by your coding agent from one prompt.

## Pricing

Datadog bills Lambda on two meters (list prices, November 2026):

| Datadog item | Billed annually | Month-to-month | On demand |
|---|---|---|---|
| Serverless Workload Monitoring, per active function per month | $5 | $6 | $7.20 |
| Serverless Functions APM, per 1M traced invocations per month | $10 | $12 | $15 |

Ivy bills one meter: €5 per million traces (one trace is one invocation), with the first 100,000 a month free.

**Example:** 40 functions and 10 million traced invocations a month.

- Datadog, billed annually: 40 × $5 + 10 × $10 = **$300 a month**, before any other Datadog products.
- Ivy: (10,000,000 − 100,000) ÷ 1,000,000 × €5 = **€49.50 a month**.

Datadog's price includes far more than tracing. Compare against what you would actually use.

## Migrating from Datadog to Ivy

1. Remove the Datadog layers and extension, or the Datadog CloudFormation macro or plugin, from the functions you want to move, and restore their original handlers if the Datadog wrapper replaced them.
2. Connect your AWS account to Ivy and pick functions by stack, name or tag (see [agent setup](https://ivytrace.dev/docs/agent-setup)), or add the Ivy layer in your infrastructure code ([manual setup](https://ivytrace.dev/docs/manual-setup)).
3. Keep Datadog for logs and metrics if you need them; Ivy's layer does not conflict with CloudWatch.

## Sources

Checked in November 2026:

- [Datadog pricing list](https://www.datadoghq.com/pricing/list/)
- [Datadog serverless billing docs](https://docs.datadoghq.com/account_management/billing/serverless/)
- [Datadog launches MCP Server](https://www.datadoghq.com/about/latest-news/press-releases/datadog-launches-mcp-server/), March 2026

Datadog is a trademark of its owner. Ivy is not affiliated with Datadog.

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Source: https://ivytrace.dev/compare/datadog · Updated 2026-11-14