# Datadog alternatives for small teams

Choose Datadog for telemetry depth. Choose Clanker Cloud when a small team needs local-first investigation and action planning around the systems it already runs.

## When Clanker Cloud fits

- The bottleneck is context switching across AWS, Kubernetes, GitHub, Cloudflare, and cost dashboards.
- Credentials and BYOK model keys should stay on the operator machine.
- The output should become a reviewed plan rather than another dashboard.

## Keep Datadog when

- Long-term telemetry storage, dashboards, traces, RUM, or mature alerting are the core requirement.
- Datadog is already the observability system of record.

## Related pages

- [Clanker Cloud vs Datadog](https://clankercloud.ai/clanker-cloud-vs-datadog)
- [Find an AWS cost spike](https://clankercloud.ai/examples/find-aws-cost-spike)
- [Local credentials](https://clankercloud.ai/security/local-credentials)