A Datadog alternative for PHP
when you have sites, not hosts.
Datadog is very good at what it does, and what it does is watch infrastructure. Its pricing says so plainly: you pay per host, and APM is an attachment to Infrastructure Monitoring rather than a product you buy on its own at the list price.
That model fits a fleet of servers you own. It fits badly when what you have is a pile of sites — a WooCommerce shop here, a client's Laravel app there, half of them on hosting where you cannot install a daemon at all.
Both are read-only and need no account, no card and nothing installed.
What you install
Requirements below are from Datadog's own PHP tracing documentation, read on 22 September 2026.
| Datadog | PHPRay | |
|---|---|---|
| Components | Two. The Datadog Agent (v6+, a daemon on the host) and the
dd-trace-php extension, put in place by an installer that edits
your PHP INI. |
One extension plus one binary you can run as your own user — or, on WordPress, a plugin with neither. |
| Root | Needed to install the Agent and the extension. | Not needed. The extension loads from your own php.ini. |
| Shared hosting | A host daemon is not something you can install there. | Yes — CageFS, LiteSpeed lsphp, mod_php. It is the case it was built for. |
| Serverless PHP | Not supported by the PHP profiler. | Not supported either — we trace long-lived PHP. |
| Where the data goes | Datadog's cloud. | Your server. Cloud optional, stored in the EU. |
| Licence | Proprietary. | Apache-2.0 core, self-hostable. |
What you pay, and what the unit is
This is the part worth reading twice, because the headline number is not the number you pay.
| Datadog | PHPRay | |
|---|---|---|
| APM | $31 per host per month on an annual commitment ($48 on demand) — and it requires an Infrastructure Monitoring attachment. | Priced per site, not per host. Cloud from $19/month for three sites. |
| The attachment | Infrastructure Pro is $15 per host per month annually ($18 on demand), so APM in practice starts at $46 per host per month. Standalone APM without infrastructure is $36. | Nothing to attach. |
| Included data | 150 GB of span ingestion and 1 million indexed spans per host per month, 15-day retention. | Plan quotas in traces per day; the local core stores on your own disk without limit. |
| Beyond that | $0.10 per extra GB ingested; retaining extra indexed spans is $1.70 per million per month at 15 days, $2.50 at 30 days (annual rates). | Included in the plan. |
| Free | Trial. | Local core unlimited and free, forever. Cloud Free: one site, 10k traces a day, 7 days, no card. |
Figures read from datadoghq.com/pricing on 22 September 2026. Five servers on APM with the required infrastructure attachment is $230 a month before a single extra gigabyte.
What you give up
Straight, because the comparison is worthless otherwise. PHPRay does not do infrastructure metrics, log management, browser or synthetic monitoring, distributed tracing across languages, incident management, or any of the hundreds of integrations Datadog ships. If you run servers and want one pane of glass over all of it, that is a real product and this is not it.
What you get instead
- Every request, not a sample. One record per request: wall time, CPU, memory, every SQL query as a fingerprint with the literals stripped, outbound HTTP, PHP errors and N+1 patterns.
- Per-plugin attribution. “The shop got slow” becomes a named plugin, a named query and the day it changed.
- A report you can send. One HTML file — or a link — that the site owner reads without installing anything.
- Measured overhead, method published. Recording every request cost 40.7 ms against a 40.2 ms baseline on a real WordPress page; per-function attribution adds about 4% there and 27% on a 48 ms micro-benchmark — we publish the inconvenient number too.
The honest summary
Datadog charges per host because it watches hosts. If your unit of work is a site — and especially if some of those sites live on hosting where a daemon is not an option — you are paying for a unit you do not have, and installing two components to get one answer.
Check it against your own site
The local core is Apache-2.0 and installs in one line — no account, no card. Or read a real report from a production WooCommerce shop first.
Install locally Read a real reportRead next
- New Relic alternative — the other big platform, priced per person instead of per host.
- Continuous profiling for PHP — what exists, and what it needs to run.
- What always-on tracing costs.
- Plans and pricing — per site, not per host.