Datadog vs. OPIK
Opik & Datadog: GenAI Observability Platform Comparison
Explore how Opik and Datadog are equipped for GenAI evaluation and observability.
Opik vs. Datadog Feature Comparison
Opik and Datadog both support observability for AI applications, but they are built with different goals in mind. Datadog extends its enterprise observability platform to GenAI workloads, focusing on tracing, metrics, and monitoring within existing APM infrastructure and supported framework integrations. Opik is a purpose-built, open-source platform for developing and improving AI systems, with native support for evaluation, experimentation, and automated optimization across a wide range of LLM and agent use cases.
| Feature | Details | Opik | Datadog |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open Source | Open-source and fully transparent with enterprise scalability |  Yes |  No |
| Observability | |||
| GenAI Tracing | Trace any AI application through a simple function decorator and 40+ integrations | Yes | Yes |
| Agent Tracking | Track complete agent execution with agent graph visuals, nested views, and tool use | Yes | Yes |
| Evaluation | |||
| Online Evaluation | Configure flexible online evaluation with LLM-as-a-judge or custom code metrics to evaluate live runs | Yes | Partial |
| Expert Annotation UI | Define feedback schemas, assign users to annotation queues, and track progress with a dedicated UI | Yes | No |
| Experimentation | Run evaluations over datasets with custom and built-in metrics supporting RAG, agentic, multimodal, and conversational use cases | Yes | Partial |
| Development | |||
| Agent Optimization | Automatically refine your entire agent & prompts | Yes | No |
| Prompt Playground | Test & refine prompts and outputs from LLMs | Yes | Partial |
| Production | |||
| Production Monitoring | Production-scale observability with metrics dashboards, alerts, and cost, latency, and usage tracking | Yes | Yes |
| Guardrails | Built-in guardrails for PII and restricted topics, as well as custom guardrails | Yes | Yes |
These Are Just the Highlights
Explore the full range of Opik’s features and capabilities in our developer documentation or check out the full repo on GitHub.
Opik’s Advantages
Opik is built specifically for teams that need deeper insight and control over how their systems perform. In addition to observability, Opik provides native evaluation, experimentation, and automated optimization designed to support modern LLM, RAG, and agentic applications throughout the development and production lifecycle.
Built for Evaluation and Optimization
Supports online and offline evaluation with custom and LLM-based metrics, enabling teams to measure quality and automatically improve prompts, tools, and agents.
Native Agent and Experiment Support
Provides agent execution graphs, dataset-driven experiments, and UI-based workflows designed for multi-step agents and complex conversational systems.
Open Source and Framework-Agnostic
Open-source and vendor-neutral, allowing teams to integrate across models and frameworks without lock-in while scaling to enterprise use cases.
Datadog’s Advantages
Datadog brings GenAI observability into its broader monitoring platform, allowing teams to track LLM usage, cost, latency, and errors alongside existing application and infrastructure metrics. Its approach centers on auto-instrumented tracing and integrations with popular frameworks, while evaluation and agent-specific workflows rely more heavily on manual configuration and SDK-based setup.
Production-Grade Observability
Provides mature tracing, metrics, dashboards, and alerts for LLM workloads, capturing prompts, completions, token usage, latency, and errors within existing monitoring workflows.
Broad Framework Integrations
Supports many popular LLM frameworks and providers with auto-instrumentation, reducing setup effort when operating within Datadog’s supported integration paths.
Fits Existing Datadog Stacks
Works well for teams already standardized on Datadog, allowing GenAI monitoring to plug into established infrastructure tooling and operational processes.
“Opik being open-source was one of the reasons we chose it. Beyond the peace of mind of knowing we can self-host if we want, the ability to debug and submit product requests when we notice things has been really helpful in making sure the product meets our needs.”
Jeremy Mumford
Lead AI Engineer, Pattern
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