New Relic is a capable full-stack observability platform. Its free tier is one of the most generous in the industry – 100 GB of data ingest per month, one full platform user, and access to all 50+ platform capabilities, including APM, distributed tracing, infrastructure monitoring, log management, browser monitoring, synthetic monitoring, and more – no credit card required.
But the moment your team or your data volume grows beyond that tier, the cost structure changes significantly. Per-user pricing at $349 per full platform user per month on the Pro plan, combined with data ingest costs of $0.40 per GB beyond the free 100 GB, can push teams toward open-source alternatives that trade managed convenience for cost control and data ownership.
This FAQ is specifically for teams evaluating New Relic open source alternatives – tools you can self-host, inspect the source code of, and run without a per-seat or per-GB bill from a SaaS vendor.
Key Takeaways
- New Relic’s free tier is genuinely generous for solo developers or very small teams – 100 GB/month ingest and one full platform user with access to every feature at no cost
- The open-source path trades operational convenience for cost control – you own the stack, you operate it, and you do not send telemetry data to a third-party SaaS
- No single open-source tool replicates New Relic’s full breadth out of the box – most require composing multiple components or accepting narrower coverage
- OpenTelemetry-native open-source tools (SigNoz, Uptrace, Grafana Faro) give you the most portable instrumentation – switching backends later does not require re-instrumentation
- The hidden cost of open-source is engineering time: initial setup is manageable, but long-term storage, upgrades, retention, and alerting maintenance are real operational commitments
- CubeAPM is not purely open source, but is included here as the managed self-hosted option for teams that want open-source economics without the ops burden
Why Teams Leave New Relic for Open Source
- Per-user pricing at scale: New Relic’s Pro plan charges $349 per full platform user per month on an annual commitment, or $418.80 month-to-month. A 10-person engineering team where everyone needs full access costs $3,490 per month in user fees alone – before a single byte of telemetry is counted. For comparison, most open-source tools have no per-user fees at all.
- Data ingest costs compound with growth: Beyond the 100 GB free tier, New Relic charges $0.40 per GB on the Original Data plan or $0.60 per GB on Data Plus. A microservices architecture with verbose logging, distributed tracing across 20+ services, and infrastructure metrics can reach 1-2 TB per month comfortably. At $0.40 per GB, 1 TB beyond the free tier costs $400 per month in data charges alone.
- Data residency and vendor dependency: New Relic is a SaaS platform. All telemetry data flows to New Relic’s infrastructure. Teams in regulated industries – healthcare, financial services, government – or teams with strict data sovereignty requirements often cannot send application telemetry to any third-party SaaS regardless of price. Open-source self-hosted tools keep all data inside your own infrastructure by design.
- Proprietary agents and NRQL lock-in: New Relic supports OpenTelemetry and native OTLP ingest, which it describes as the preferred method for sending OTel data into the platform. But many teams built on New Relic over the years have instrumentation built around New Relic agents and NRQL queries. Migrating requires rebuilding dashboards, alerts, and sometimes re-instrumenting services. Open-source tools built on OpenTelemetry standards make future backend switching easier.
- Platform breadth beyond what the team uses: New Relic’s free tier includes all 50+ observability capabilities. Teams that only need APM traces and slow query analysis are still managing a platform far broader than their actual use case. Open-source tools let teams compose exactly the coverage they need.
The Two Approaches to Open-Source New Relic Replacement
Approach 1: Composable open-source stack
Assemble individual best-in-class open-source tools for each observability signal: Prometheus for metrics, Loki for logs, Tempo for traces, Grafana for visualization. This gives maximum control and flexibility, but requires deploying, configuring, integrating, and operating multiple separate components.
Approach 2: Unified open-source platform
Deploy a single open-source platform that handles metrics, logs, and traces together with a built-in UI. SigNoz and Uptrace both fit this pattern. Easier to operate than a composable stack, but you accept the design decisions the platform made about storage backends and query interfaces.
The Best Open-Source New Relic Alternatives
1. CubeAPM – Managed Self-Hosted (Not Open Source, But Open-Source Economics)
License: Commercial (vendor-managed self-hosted) Best for: Teams that want open-source economics – no per-user fees, predictable ingest-based pricing, data stays in your own VPC – without the operational burden of running a full open-source stack themselves.
CubeAPM is not open-source. It is a managed self-hosted observability platform built natively on OpenTelemetry. The reason it belongs in this comparison is that it solves the same problems that drive teams to open source – cost predictability, data control, no per-user pricing – without requiring your team to operate the backend themselves. CubeAPM deploys into your own cloud account via Helm, your data never leaves your infrastructure, and CubeAPM manages upgrades, storage, and operations remotely.
What it covers compared to New Relic:
| New Relic capability | CubeAPM coverage |
| APM and distributed tracing | Yes |
| Log management | Yes |
| Infrastructure and Kubernetes monitoring | Yes |
| RUM and error tracking | Yes |
| Synthetic monitoring | Yes |
| OpenTelemetry native | Yes |
| Self-hosted / data stays in your VPC | Yes |
Pricing: $0.15 per GB ingested. No per-user fees. No per-host fees. Unlimited retention included.
Compared to New Relic at scale: At 1 TB per month beyond the free tier, New Relic costs $400/month in data ingest alone (at $0.40/GB), plus user fees. At 1 TB/month, CubeAPM costs approximately $150/month all-in with no user fees.
Honest trade-off: CubeAPM is not open source – you cannot inspect or modify the codebase. It requires provisioning Kubernetes infrastructure in your own cloud account. For teams that want fully open code they can audit and modify, one of the options above is more appropriate.
2. SigNoz – Unified OTel-Native Platform
License: Open-source (AGPL-3.0 for Community Edition) Best for: Teams that want a unified logs, metrics, and traces platform in one UI, built natively on OpenTelemetry, with a self-hosted path that requires no proprietary agents.
SigNoz is the closest single-tool open-source equivalent to New Relic’s observability experience. It covers APM-style application metrics, distributed tracing, log management, exceptions, dashboards, and alerting in one platform, with a ClickHouse backend that handles high-volume telemetry efficiently.
What it covers compared to New Relic:
| New Relic capability | SigNoz coverage |
| APM and distributed tracing | Yes – p50/p90/p99 latencies, error rates, service maps |
| Log management | Yes – OTel-native log collection and search |
| Infrastructure metrics | Yes – via OTel Collector |
| Dashboards and alerting | Yes |
| Browser/RUM monitoring | Partial – via OTel browser SDK |
| Synthetic monitoring | No |
| Session replay | No |
Deployment: Docker Compose for smaller setups, Helm chart for Kubernetes production. No proprietary agents – uses OpenTelemetry SDKs and Collector.
Honest trade-off: You manage ClickHouse storage, upgrades, retention, and reliability yourself. SigNoz’s community is active, but production operations require real DevOps attention. Cloud and enterprise options (BYOC, dedicated cloud) exist if self-managed becomes too burdensome – pricing starts at $49/month for cloud.
What it does not cover: Synthetic monitoring, session replay, mobile RUM. For teams that rely on these in New Relic, SigNoz needs to be paired with additional tools.
3. Grafana + Prometheus + Loki + Tempo (LGTM Stack)
License: Open-source (Apache 2.0 / AGPL for Grafana Enterprise features) Best for: Teams with strong DevOps capacity who want maximum flexibility, existing Prometheus investment, and the ability to compose observability exactly as they need it.
The Grafana LGTM stack is the most widely deployed open-source observability stack in the world. Prometheus handles metrics collection and alerting, Loki handles log aggregation, Tempo handles distributed traces, and Grafana provides the visualization and dashboarding layer across all of them. The Grafana Alloy collector (an OpenTelemetry Collector distribution) handles data collection.
What it covers compared to New Relic:
| New Relic capability | LGTM coverage |
| APM and distributed tracing | Yes – via Tempo |
| Log management | Yes – via Loki |
| Infrastructure metrics | Yes – via Prometheus/node-exporter |
| Dashboards | Yes – Grafana’s strongest capability |
| Alerting | Yes – Grafana Alerting / Prometheus Alertmanager |
| Browser/RUM | Yes – via Grafana Faro (OTel-native) |
| Synthetic monitoring | Yes – via Grafana Synthetic Monitoring |
Deployment: Helm charts for each component. kube-prometheus-stack is the common Kubernetes entry point. Can be deployed on any infrastructure.
Honest trade-off: This is a stack, not a product. You deploy, configure, integrate, scale, and upgrade four separate components. At scale, self-hosted Grafana, Loki, and Tempo can exhibit performance degradation – storage management and query optimization become active operational work. If your team does not have dedicated DevOps capacity, the ongoing burden is material. Grafana Cloud offers a managed version starting from $19/month plus usage if the ops overhead becomes prohibitive.
Grafana Faro for RUM: Grafana Faro is Grafana’s open-source Real User Monitoring SDK, built on OpenTelemetry conventions. It covers Core Web Vitals, JavaScript errors, and frontend performance metrics. It does not include session replay – that is a capability gap relative to New Relic.
4. Elastic APM – If You Already Run Elasticsearch
License: Open-source Basic license for self-managed APM (some features require paid Elastic license) Best for: Teams already running Elasticsearch or the ELK stack for log management who want to extend into APM without deploying a second observability platform.
Elastic APM is the application performance monitoring component of Elastic Observability, built on the Elastic Stack. The self-managed version under the Elastic Basic license includes core APM functionality at no additional cost. Elasticsearch provides powerful full-text and structured search across traces, logs, and metrics in a unified workflow.
What it covers compared to New Relic:
| New Relic capability | Elastic APM coverage |
| APM and distributed tracing | Yes |
| Log management | Yes – Elasticsearch is strongest here |
| Infrastructure metrics | Yes – via Elastic Agent |
| Kubernetes monitoring | Yes |
| Browser/RUM | Yes – via Elastic JavaScript RUM agent |
| Synthetic monitoring | Yes – browser and lightweight monitors |
| OpenTelemetry support | Yes – OTLP ingest supported |
Deployment: Self-managed Elastic cluster (Elasticsearch + Kibana + APM Server + Elastic Agent). This is a non-trivial operational undertaking – cluster sizing, shard management, index lifecycle management, and storage tuning require Elasticsearch expertise.
Honest trade-off: Elastic APM is best evaluated only if your team already runs Elasticsearch. Deploying Elasticsearch cold, solely for APM, is a heavy operational choice when simpler alternatives exist. Self-managing an Elastic cluster at production scale is a substantial engineering commitment. The Basic license covers core APM – some advanced features require a paid Elastic subscription.
5. Uptrace – Lightweight OTel-Native Tracing and APM
License: Open-source (AGPL-3.0) Best for: Teams that want an OpenTelemetry-native platform focused on distributed tracing and APM, with a lightweight footprint and ClickHouse as the storage backend.
Uptrace is an OpenTelemetry-native observability platform built on ClickHouse, covering traces, metrics, and logs in a unified interface. It is lighter than SigNoz in scope and is particularly strong for teams whose primary use case is distributed tracing and APM metrics rather than full-stack infrastructure observability.
What it covers compared to New Relic:
| New Relic capability | Uptrace coverage |
| APM and distributed tracing | Yes – service graphs, RED metrics, top errors |
| Logs | Yes |
| Metrics | Yes |
| Dashboards and alerts | Yes |
| Kubernetes monitoring | Yes – via OTel Operator |
| Browser/RUM, synthetics | No |
Deployment: Docker Compose or Kubernetes Helm. Self-hosted Community Edition is free. Cloud option and Premium Edition ($200/month) also available.
Honest trade-off: Uptrace is more focused than New Relic. Teams that need broad infrastructure monitoring, RUM, synthetics, and session replay alongside APM will find it narrower. For teams whose primary need is distributed tracing and service health visibility, that narrowness is a feature – less to configure and operate.
6. Apache SkyWalking – Java and JVM-Heavy Environments
License: Open-source (Apache License 2.0) Best for: Enterprise Java and JVM-based microservices environments where deep bytecode instrumentation and automatic discovery matter more than OpenTelemetry portability.
Apache SkyWalking is an open-source APM platform for distributed systems with particularly strong support for Java, .NET, Node.js, Go, and Python. It provides service topology mapping, distributed tracing, performance analysis, and alerting. It supports OpenTelemetry ingestion alongside its own agent ecosystem.
What it covers compared to New Relic:
| New Relic capability | SkyWalking coverage |
| APM and distributed tracing | Yes – strong for JVM |
| Service topology mapping | Yes |
| Infrastructure metrics | Yes |
| Log integration | Yes |
| Kubernetes monitoring | Yes |
| OpenTelemetry support | Compatible (not fully native) |
Deployment: Self-hosted with supported backends including BanyanDB (SkyWalking’s native storage) or Elasticsearch.
Honest trade-off: SkyWalking uses its own agent ecosystem and is better described as OpenTelemetry-compatible rather than OpenTelemetry-native. Teams standardizing on OTel pipelines for long-term backend portability may prefer SigNoz or Uptrace. SkyWalking is strongest for enterprises already familiar with the platform or teams in Java-heavy environments where its automatic bytecode instrumentation provides significant value.
Side-by-Side: Open Source Coverage vs New Relic
| Capability | CubeAPM | SigNoz | LGTM Stack | Elastic APM | Uptrace | SkyWalking |
| APM / traces | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Logs | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Infrastructure metrics | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Partial | Yes |
| Dashboards | Yes | Yes | Yes (Grafana) | Yes (Kibana) | Yes | Yes |
| Browser RUM | Yes | Partial | Yes (Faro) | Yes | No | No |
| Synthetic monitoring | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | No | No |
| Session replay | Yes | No | No | No | No | No |
| OTel native | Yes | Yes | Yes | Partial | Yes | Compatible |
| No per-user fee | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes (in your VPC) | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Ops burden | Low | High | Very High | Very High | Medium | High |
The Operational Cost Nobody Talks About
Every self-hosted open-source tool shares the same hidden cost: engineering time. Setup is the straightforward part. Production operations – storage management, retention policies, version upgrades, query performance tuning, backup and recovery, alerting reliability – are where the ongoing overhead lives.
For a two-person platform team supporting 20 engineers, maintaining a full LGTM stack in production is a meaningful part-time job. SigNoz and Uptrace are more contained, but still require real operational attention.
This is the trade-off that the open-source path requires you to make explicitly. The dollar cost goes down. The engineering time cost does not disappear – it shifts from your cloud bill to your team’s calendar.
How to Choose
- You want the closest open-source equivalent to New Relic’s unified experience: SigNoz
- You already use Prometheus and Grafana and want to add traces and logs: LGTM stack
- You already run Elasticsearch and want APM without a second platform: Elastic APM
- You primarily need distributed tracing and APM with a lighter footprint: Uptrace
- You run Java-heavy microservices and want deep JVM instrumentation: Apache SkyWalking
- You want open-source economics (no per-user fees, data in your VPC) without the ops burden: CubeAPM
- You are under 100 GB/month and have one primary platform user: New Relic’s free tier – use it
Summary
New Relic’s free tier is the right starting point for small teams – 100 GB/month of data ingest and one full platform user with access to every feature at no cost is a genuinely strong offer. The economics change when your team size or telemetry volume grows beyond that threshold.
Open-source alternatives trade the managed convenience and breadth of New Relic for cost control and data ownership. No single open-source tool replicates New Relic’s full feature surface. SigNoz comes closest as a unified platform. The LGTM stack covers the most ground but requires the most operational investment. Uptrace and SkyWalking are right for more specific use cases.
The choice is ultimately between paying in dollars (New Relic or CubeAPM) and paying in engineering time (self-managed open source).
Disclaimer: This article is produced by CubeAPM, one of the tools evaluated here. New Relic pricing and feature details are sourced directly and exclusively from New Relic’s official pricing page (newrelic.com/pricing) as of May 2026 – verify current pricing directly with New Relic before making decisions. All open-source tool details are based on publicly available documentation at time of writing. Nothing here constitutes professional, legal, or compliance advice. Pricing for all tools changes over time – always verify directly with each vendor.
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