7 Alternatives to New Relic

New Relic is a well-known application performance monitoring (APM) solution that helps engineers visualize, monitor, and troubleshoot their systems. As businesses evolve, engineers must deliver new capabilities at greater scale and speed, often while managing an increasing number of services and systems. This naturally raises the question: what tools can help?

For many teams, that means taking a fresh look at their observability stack. Some are looking to reduce high costs. Others want deeper insights and to achieve end-to-end observability. Whatever the motivation, this guide explores seven top New Relic alternatives, comparing their core features, benefits, and pricing to help you find the right observability stack for your team.

What to look for in an observability tool

You need an observability platform that enables teams to quickly understand, debug, and optimize their systems. Dashboards and alerts are just one small part of the search criteria. If you need to scale systems to meet business needs and market demands, be ready to consider several factors and observability tools.

Key factors to consider when evaluating observability tools:

• OpenTelemetry compatibility: provides vendor flexibility and futureproof instrumentation.
• Transparent pricing: avoid surprises with clear and easily predictable costs.
• High data fidelity: capture detailed, high-cardinality event data without losing critical context.
• Real-time insights: diagnose and resolve issues as they happen, not hours later.
• Strong developer experience: fast setup, intuitive workflows, and actionable insights.

One final tip: seek out feature-to-feature comparisons between your top choices. For example, this New Relic vs Honeycomb comparison can help you quickly pinpoint the features that matter to you and spot the differences in features, performance, and pricing, helping you to identify the best tool for your needs.

Now, let’s discuss some alternatives to New Relic!

Honeycomb

Welcome to the Honeycomb blog! Honeycomb is an alternative to New Relic, an observability platform designed to help engineers debug distributed systems in real-time. Unlike New Relic, which stores different kinds of telemetry data separately and correlates them, Honeycomb stores wide events and derives log, metrics, and trace views, giving engineers one single source of truth and context in place to drill into and filter through every view of your system.

Core features

• AI-native with features like Anomaly Detection, MCP, and Canvas.
• Native OpenTelemetry support.
• Full and fast access to all event fields (regardless of the number of fields) without performance or cost penalties.
• Live distributed tracing across microservices.
• Enables customizable data strategies through dynamic sampling and fast and targeted hydration of rarely needed data from S3.
• One-click analysis on which fields make a difference in problem logs or traces.
• Actionable SLOs, boards, and triggers for proactive service health monitoring.

Other facts about Honeycomb

• Built by observability pioneers, including core contributors to OpenTelemetry.
• Recently implemented changes to improve the getting started experience, with a more familiar log search, automated migration from New Relic, and AI tools for natural language querying.
• Used by companies like Heroku, HelloFresh, Fender, and more.
• Ingest-based pricing lets you customize your data strategy, helping you avoid overpaying for low-value data.
• Consolidates metrics, traces, and logs into streamlined workflows.

Pricing

Honeycomb’s pricing differs from New Relic since there are no per-user charges. For more details, please visit our pricing page. To summarize:

• Free plan does not require a credit card and lasts forever at $0/month, $0/year up to 20M events per month.
• Pro plan starts at $130/month, $1300/year, up to 100M events per month, single sign-on (SSO), and Honeycomb support.
• Enterprise plans have all the features of the Pro plan but with more SLOs, frontend observability, more data strategy options, enterprise support, onboarding, and more.

Datadog

Datadog is a cloud-based monitoring and security platform known for its extensive integrations and interactive out-of-the-box dashboards. It is a popular choice for organizations that need to track metrics, logs, and traces in one place. There are new features, like Bits AI, that are charged at an additional cost even with an enterprise plan, but offer powerful ways to glean insights from telemetry signals.

When comparing New Relic vs Datadog, Datadog is a robust and powerful alternative, but its pricing model can quickly become very costly. Making a comparison without more details can be difficult, so to help with this, we’ve put together a reference to how Datadog compares to alternatives like Honeycomb.

Core features

• Full-stack observability.
• 600+ built-in integrations.
• Many addons and features are available, including real user monitoring (RUM) and synthetic monitoring.
• AI-assisted alerts and anomaly detection.

Pricing

• A free plan is available with 1-day metric retention and supports up to five hosts.
• Pro plan starts at $15/host/month.
• Enterprise plans start at $23/host/month and go up to $34/host/month.
• You will be charged for any additional usage per host outside of the allotted quantities specified by your plan.
• Addons and new features incur additional costs.
• Custom metrics are billed according to the number of values for each tag combination.

Dynatrace

Dynatrace is an observability platform with a heavy emphasis on AI-powered automation. It excels at infrastructure monitoring and root cause analysis through its Davis AI engine. While Dynatrace reduces the need for manual configuration, it has a steep learning curve, and its querying functions are not as flexible as those of the APM alternatives listed here.

Core features

• Davis AI engine.
• Automatic root cause analysis.
• Support for hybrid, multi-cloud, and Kubernetes environments.

Pricing

• Consumption-based pricing, à la carte style, based on the services you want to use.
• Full-stack monitoring starts at $0.08 per GiB hour.
• Real user monitoring starts at $0.00225 per session.
• Minimum annual spend commitment is required when licensing.

Sentry

Sentry is a developer-first error monitoring and performance platform designed to surface real-time issues across frontend and backend code. When comparing New Relic vs Sentry, New Relic delivers correlated traces, metrics, and logs, improving visibility into complex or distributed systems much better than Sentry. While a great alternative for error tracking, Sentry doesn’t offer full observability across services.

Core features

• Real-time error and performance monitoring.
• Source map integration for frontend debugging.
• Lightweight SDKs facilitate easy integration with popular application runtimes and languages.
• Transaction tracing for understanding performance bottlenecks.

Pricing

• A free plan is available, limited to one user, 5k errors, and 10M tracing spans.
• Team plan starting at $26/month for unlimited users.
• Business plan starting at $80/month.
• Flexible and custom enterprise plans.

Grafana

Grafana is an open source visualization tool that enables users to create dashboards on top of various data sources, including Prometheus, Loki, and Tempo. Grafana is ideal for teams building custom observability stacks. For teams that require tracing and analysis with minimal maintenance and effort, other alternatives offer more complete features and functions out of the box.

Core features

• Custom dashboards and panels.
• Native support for Prometheus, Loki, and OpenTelemetry.
• Alerting and rule-based workflows.
• Open source and cloud-hosted options.

Pricing

For Grafana cloud:

• Always free plan is available, with community support.
• Pro plan starting at $19/month + usage.
• Enterprise starts at a $25K/year spend commitment.

Splunk

Splunk is a well-established data analytics and log management solution that has expanded into observability through acquisitions like AppDynamics and SignalFx. Splunk’s strength lies in log analytics. Developers needing immediate insights into distributed systems performance may find alternatives that offer more actionable observability.

Core features

• Sophisticated log analytics and dashboards.
• Infrastructure and application performance monitoring.
• Integration with AppDynamics and cloud-native tools.
• Enterprise-grade scalability and reliability.

Pricing

• Splunk Observability Cloud pricing is billed annually.
• The Infrastructure plan starts at $15/host/month.
• App & Infra monitoring starts at $60/host/month.
• End-to-End starts at $75/host/month.
• Splunk RUM starts at $14 per 10,000 sessions.
• Synthetic monitoring starts at $1 per 10,000 uptime requests.

SolarWinds (formerly Sumo Logic)

SolarWinds acquired Sumo Logic to expand its observability and APM capabilities. It now offers cloud-native log analytics and APM tools powered by AI insights. SolarWinds is a cost-conscious solution for teams with simpler workloads. In comparison, New Relic and other alternatives offer better workflows for debugging and interacting with the telemetry data in the platform.

Core features

• Logs, metrics, and traces are integrated into one platform.
• AI-powered anomaly detection.
• Cloud and hybrid environment support.
• Dashboards and custom alerts.

Pricing

• Monitoring & observability plan starts at $6/node/month

Finding observability tools that scale with you

The real advantage of choice in observability comes from OpenTelemetry. With it, you can continue sending data to New Relic today and seamlessly migrate to other tools tomorrow.

An easy way to get started with OpenTelemetry is with a free Honeycomb account. Honeycomb supports OpenTelemetry and provides exceptional visibility from day one. As your systems grow, Honeycomb scales right alongside, providing a futureproofed observability solution that meets your needs now and helps you build value and a stronger observability culture over time.