New Relic alternatives: 8 application performance monitoring tools compared
New Relic tends to lose customers on its user meter. Basic users are free, but a full platform user on Pro is listed at $349 a month, so access, not data, can drive the quote, and some want a simpler console. Those who leave go to OpenTelemetry services priced on usage, or to a broader suite such as Datadog.
Pricing: Free tier of 100 GB a month; then per GB ingested plus per core and full-platform user, published
Established in: United States
Built for: Container fleets where host counting would be punishing
Not for: Large groups of occasional viewers who all need full access
01
Why buyers look past New Relic
01
Full platform seats are the expensive line
New Relic charges $0.40 per GB beyond 100 GB free each month, and per user. Basic users are free, core users are $49 a month, and full platform users on Pro are $349 a month each with an annual commitment. Standard is cheaper per seat but allows five full platform users at most. Many occasional viewers needing full access is the poor fit.
02
The console steers people to the expensive tier
The interface is dense and deep, and people therefore ask for the full platform seat. A plan that began with a handful of full users and many free basic ones drifts towards the costly tier as colleagues request more access. New Relic does offer compute-based pricing without user licences on Pro and Enterprise, but its rate is not published.
03
Ingest pricing follows how talkative the code is
Paying per gigabyte suits a fleet of small containers, where counting hosts would be punishing. It is less comfortable for an application that emits a great deal of telemetry from a few stable machines, where a per-host meter such as Instana's would hold the bill still.
Per host per month, published; self-hosted edition available
#14
your hosts are stable and your telemetry volume is not
03
What each one does differently
1
Grafana Cloud
United States · Free tier; Pro has a monthly platform fee plus usage on metrics, logs and traces and per active user, published
Grafana Cloud is priced on metrics, logs and traces used, plus a $19 monthly platform fee on Pro and $8 per active user beyond the three included, far below New Relic's full platform seat. The underlying stack is open source you can run yourself, and active series are what the metrics meter counts.
Switch from New Relic if seats are your cost problem and someone can own query and storage tuning.
United States · Free tier to 5 hosts; per host per month plus per GB of logs and per custom metric, published
Datadog prices each product separately, from infrastructure to security, and cites over 1,000 integrations. Where New Relic bills ingest and users, Datadog bills per host, per gigabyte of logs and per custom metric at once, lists no seat price for its core products, and keeps some features for its own agent.
Switch from New Relic if you want the widest coverage and can police tags and log volume.
India · Open source self-hosted; cloud from USD 49 a month, priced per GB ingested, published
SigNoz's cloud uses the per-gigabyte idea New Relic does, at $0.30 per GB for logs and traces from $49 a month, with unlimited teammates, and the product is open source to self-host. OpenTelemetry is its only input. Its query experience, alerting and integrations are shallower than the established vendors.
Switch from New Relic if you want ingest pricing on OpenTelemetry with a self-hosted fallback.
Austria · Consumption-based per host hour or memory-GiB hour and per GiB ingested, published rates
Dynatrace draws the dependency map automatically from one agent per host and bills on host hours and gibibytes ingested, with unlimited seats and no per-seat fee. Where New Relic treats OTLP as a first-class input, Dynatrace's best features assume its own agent, and small teams are not its buyer.
Switch from New Relic if you run a large, poorly documented estate and need auto-discovery.
United States · Free tier; per event ingested per month, published
Honeycomb prices per event, with a free tier of 20M events a month and Pro from $150 a month, and every plan includes unlimited seats. It is designed for querying wide, high-cardinality events, a narrower and more opinionated tool than New Relic's platform, and spiky traffic makes the event count hard to plan.
Switch from New Relic if your engineers debug distributed systems by exploring, not by watching graphs.
Germany · Usage-based per million spans, log records and metric data points, published; 14-day trial
Dash0 accepts only OTLP and publishes a price per million spans, log records and metric data points, so the bill can be worked out from telemetry volume. New Relic already takes OTLP natively, which helps instrumentation carry across. Dash0 is the newest product here, with a thin integration catalogue.
Switch from New Relic if you already send OpenTelemetry and want a price you can calculate from span counts.
Netherlands · Consumption-based on ingest and retention, published rates
Elastic stores logs, traces and metrics in one searchable index, can be self-hosted, and charges for ingest and retention where New Relic charges for ingest and users. You take on cluster tuning, and retention set carelessly becomes the main cost.
Switch from New Relic if you already operate Elasticsearch and want one store.
United States · Per host per month, published; self-hosted edition available
IBM Instana charges per host and captures every trace without sampling, so traffic does not move the bill the way ingest does at New Relic. A self-hosted edition is available. The interface is dated and the purchase follows an IBM sales process.
Switch from New Relic if your hosts are stable and your telemetry volume is not.
New Relic fits an estate of many small containers looked after by a handful of engineers who use the platform properly. The ingest-plus-users model rewards exactly that shape, the free tier covers 100 GB a month and one full platform user, and OTLP is accepted natively, so instrumentation is not locked in. If the number of full platform seats is small and stable, there is little reason to take on a migration.
05
What moving off New Relic involves
01
Check how each service is instrumented
New Relic accepts OTLP through a native endpoint alongside its own agents. Services already sending OpenTelemetry can be pointed at another OTLP endpoint; services on the proprietary agent need instrumenting again. Sort your services into those two groups before estimating anything, because the second group is where the migration effort sits.
02
Translate the bill into the new unit
You currently pay for gigabytes and seats. Honeycomb counts events, Dash0 spans and log records, Grafana Cloud active series plus active users, Instana hosts. Work out your own figures for each unit from real data, and remember that the saving you expect from dropping seats can reappear as cardinality.
03
People lose a console they learned
The depth that makes the interface dense is also what experienced users rely on. Identify the queries and views your on-call engineers open during incidents and rebuild those first in the new tool, before the old contract ends, so the first outage is not a training exercise.
06
Questions about replacing New Relic
5 answers
Why is New Relic expensive for larger teams?
Because users are metered as well as data.
Basic users are free and core users are $49 a month, but a full platform user on Pro is listed at $349 a month with an annual commitment, and the dense console leads people to request it. Standard allows at most five.
Which New Relic alternatives do not charge per user?
SigNoz allows unlimited teammates, Honeycomb includes unlimited seats on every plan, and Dynatrace states there is no per-seat fee.
Dash0 meters telemetry only, with a per-user price just for an optional AI insights add-on. Grafana Cloud does charge for users: $8 per active user beyond three on Pro.
Is Datadog or New Relic the better choice?
Datadog offers the widest coverage and the most meters: hosts, logs, custom metrics, spans and more. New Relic has two, ingest and users. Container-heavy teams with few users usually do better on New Relic; organisations wanting every product from one vendor lean to Datadog.
Can I move from New Relic to an open source tool?
Yes. SigNoz is open source and takes OpenTelemetry as its only input, and the Grafana stack behind Grafana Cloud can be self-hosted. Because New Relic accepts OTLP natively, services instrumented that way are the simplest to move. Self-hosting SigNoz means operating a ClickHouse cluster.
Does New Relic have a free plan?
Yes. The free tier includes 100 GB of data ingest a month, unlimited basic users and one full platform user.
Beyond that, data costs $0.40 per GB, or $0.60 on the Data Plus option, and further full platform users on Standard cost $99 a month each, up to five.
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Sources
Checked 30 September 2026
New Relic pricing page: free allowance, per-GB rates, user prices per edition and the compute-based option.
