Top 7 New Relic Alternatives in 2025: Features, Pricing & Reviews

Enterprises are modernizing and adopting microservices, making real-time, cost-effective, and flexible observability not just a preference but a necessity. New Relic has long been a major player in the APM space, offering full-stack monitoring with features like APM, Real User Monitoring (RUM), Synthetic Monitoring, and custom dashboards. However, with its cloud-only approach, high per-user costs (up to $400 per user/month), and limited support for open standards like OpenTelemetry and Prometheus, many teams are actively considering more agile alternatives.

The APM market is undergoing a significant shift. According to a recent survey by EMA/DevOpsDigest (April 2025), as of Q1 2025, nearly 75% of organizations have adopted or plan to adopt OpenTelemetry—48.5% already use it in production, and 25.3% are in planning—clearly indicating a major shift toward vendor-neutral observability. This signals a clear shift toward open standards, flexible deployment models (including on-prem hosting), and predictable usage-based pricing—areas where modern APM platforms like CubeAPM, Dynatrace, Grafana, and Coralogix excel.

CubeAPM is the most compelling alternative to New Relic because it offers a simpler pricing model (starting at $0.15/GB), native OTEL and Prometheus compatibility, and full support for self-hosting. It enables teams to reduce observability costs by up to 80% while gaining faster support and easier agent migration. With CubeAPM, you get state-of-the-art features like infrastructure monitoring and smart sampling at a fraction of the cost.

In this article, we break down the top 7 alternatives to New Relic in 2025, comparing tools based on cost transparency, OTEL compatibility, real-time performance monitoring, infrastructure observability, and AI/ML-powered anomaly detection.

Top 7 New Relic Alternatives

1. CubeAPM
2. Data Dog
3. DynaTrace
4. AppDynamics
5. Grafana
6. CoraLogix
7. Sentry

Why Look for New Relic Alternatives?

While New Relic is a robust tool, it has its fair share of drawbacks. For many users, it is overpriced and feels too complex for routine tasks. Here are the top reasons why users want to switch from New Relic to other application observability tools.

1. High Licensing and Ingestion Costs

Skyrocketing Licensing & Ingestion Costs: New Relic vs CubeAPM Pricing Breakdown

New Relic’s pricing model can become prohibitively expensive for teams running large-scale microservices. Full-access user licenses on Pro or Enterprise plans can go up to $400 per user/month, and that’s just the beginning. Additional costs quickly pile up with:

• Data ingestion: $0.35–$0.50/GB after the 100 GB free tier
• Extended data retention: $1.50/GB for 90 days
• Synthetic monitoring: $0.01 per additional check

This model doesn’t scale well for environments with large volumes of logs, metrics, and traces — especially for engineering teams needing multiple full-platform users to debug distributed systems.

Cost Comparison Example 1: Mid-Sized E-commerce Company
New Relic (Pro Plan)

• 20 Full Platform Users: 20 × $349 = $6,980/month
• 10 TB Data Ingestion: (9,900 GB × $0.35) = $3,465/month
• 10,000 Synthetic Checks: $50/month
• Total: $10,495/month

CubeAPM

• 10 TB Data Ingestion: 10,240 GB × $0.15 = $1,536/month
• No user-based pricing
• Total: $1,536/month

Cost Comparison Example 2: Startup
New Relic (Pro Plan)

• 10 Full Platform Users: 10 × $349 = $3,490/month
• 4 TB Data Ingestion: (3,900 GB × $0.35) = $1,330/month

Total: $4,820/month

CubeAPM

• 4 TB Data Ingestion: 4,000 GB × $0.15 = $600/month
• No host or user-based charges
• Total: $600/month

Summary:

Mid-size company: $10,495/month with New Relic vs $1,536/month with CubeAPM

Startup: $4,820/month with New Relic vs $600/month with CubeAPM

CubeAPM offers a radically simpler and more predictable pricing model, charging only based on data ingestion, regardless of the number of users, hosts, or synthetic checks.

2. Limited Open Standards Compatibility

New Relic offers partial support for  OpenTelemetry and Prometheus, pushing teams to switch to flexible observability tools like CubeAPM. Relying heavily on proprietary agents and custom instrumentation, New Relic creates vendor lock-in, making it tough for DevOps teams to integrate with open-source ecosystems or migrate data without re-instrumenting apps. This rigidity frustrates teams that require interoperability across Kubernetes or multi-cloud setups.

3. No On-Prem or Self-Hosting Options

New Relic’s cloud-only architecture poses a challenge for organizations with strict data localization bound by data residency laws (e.g., in healthcare, finance, or government) with strict compliance needs, including GDPR, HIPAA, or SOC 2

4. Basic AI/ML and Smart Sampling Features

New Relic’s AI/ML capabilities for anomaly detection rely on basic algorithms to identify issues like latency spikes or error rates, but they lack the sophisticated, predictive insights.

New Relic’s standard sampling approach captures fixed data subsets, requiring users to configure sample sizes (e.g., 1%, 5%, or 10% of traces), which can miss critical anomalies and increase data ingestion costs. In contrast, CubeAPM uses smart sampling, ingesting all data and leveraging contextual analysis (e.g., comparing current API latency to historical norms) to dynamically retain high-value data points without predefined sampling rates, achieving a significantly higher signal-to-noise ratio compared to New Relic’s rigid, user-defined sampling method.

5. Setup Complexity and Steep Learning Curve

Its UI is often described as cluttered, and its agent-heavy installation process adds friction for teams looking to get started quickly.

6. Limited DevOps and Collaboration Integrations

While some integrations exist, native support for tools like Slack, PagerDuty, GitHub Actions, or Jira is either limited or tied to premium tiers, slowing down incident response workflows.

Criteria for Suggesting New Relic Alternatives

When evaluating alternatives to New Relic, we’ve used a combination of technical, operational, and economic factors drawn from a comprehensive feature comparison. Our criteria include:

1. OpenTelemetry & Prometheus Support

Given the rising adoption of open standards, strong support for OTEL and Prometheus was a core filter. Tools like CubeAPM, Grafana Cloud, and Coralogix stand out here.

2. Cost Efficiency & Transparent Billing

Alternatives with flat or usage-based pricing, clear data retention policies, and no per-user penalties scored higher. CubeAPM, for example, charges ~$0.15/GB for ingestion with unlimited users, ensuring 60–80% cost savings.

CubeAPM offers an Enterprise plan, especially for larger teams that need a custom plan billed annually. Customized for larger teams, the Enterprise plan is tailored for organizations with complex needs, such as those managing large-scale, distributed applications or requiring advanced monitoring capabilities across multiple teams or departments.

3. Self-hosting or Data Residency Control

For teams with regulatory requirements or large on-prem infrastructure, tools that offer on-prem or region-specific hosting were favored—such as CubeAPM.

4. Unified MELT Stack (Metrics, Events, Logs, Traces)

A complete observability platform should support the full MELT stack. We selected tools that can monitor everything from infrastructure to RUM (Real User Monitoring) and synthetic tests.

5. Fast Setup & Operational Simplicity

APM tools that offer easy onboarding, clean UI/UX, and lightweight agent deployment were prioritized. Platforms like CubeAPM and Dynatrace scored well here.

6. Advanced Features & AI Monitoring

Software engineers and DevOps teams prioritize advanced features like anomaly detection, smart sampling, and AI-assisted alerting when picking New Relic alternatives. Microservices generate huge volumes of data. These features catch problems early, keeping apps running smoothly.

Unlike New Relic’s basic approach, they predict issues and cut downtime, enabling DevOps teams to fix issues before they escalate. Plus, they scale with growing systems without choking resources, giving teams smart, actionable insights to stay on top. Dynatrace, Datadog, and CubeAPM excel in this.

7. Collaboration & Integrations

Integrations with Slack, Jira, PagerDuty, GitHub Actions, and other DevOps tools were also considered important to streamline incident management workflows.

8. User Experience and Operational Simplicity

Fast onboarding, low learning curve, intuitive dashboards, and ease of setup were essential for developer adoption.

New Relic Overview

Known for:

Enterprise-grade full-stack application performance monitoring (APM) and custom dashboarding, widely used for visibility across frontend, backend, and infrastructure.

Key Features

1. Full-Stack Observability

New Relic provides a consolidated view of applications, infrastructure, synthetics, logs, and RUM within a unified interface. It’s designed to serve developers, SREs, and product managers alike.

2. Custom Dashboards & Querying

With its proprietary New Relic Query Language (NRQL), users can create tailored dashboards to visualize telemetry data from across systems and services.

3. Distributed Tracing & Error Inbox

New Relic supports trace-based diagnostics and includes an Errors Inbox that helps teams consolidate and triage issues across services. However, its sampling relies on standard probabilistic models.

4. Synthetic and Real User Monitoring

The platform supports synthetic transaction testing and browser instrumentation, enabling performance tracking across user sessions.

5. Alerts and Basic ML-Based Insights

New Relic offers anomaly detection and alerting features, though ML/AI features are more limited than newer competitors like Dynatrace.

Standout Features

• Powerful custom dashboards using NRQL
• Unified telemetry in one UI (APM, Infra, Logs, Browser)
• Pre-built integrations for AWS, Azure, GCP
• Broad adoption in enterprise DevOps setups
• Good documentation and in-app onboarding flows

Pros

• Mature, battle-tested platform
• Extensive integrations across cloud and SaaS ecosystem
• Deep visibility into application performance and errors
• Good browser monitoring and synthetic testing capabilities

Cons

• Pricing is complex and expensive, with data ingestion cost of $0.35/GB and $400 per user per month on top of it for full-access users on the Pro/Enterprise tiers.

• Limited OpenTelemetry support and proprietary agents
• No on-prem/self-hosted option
• Retention beyond 30 days requires additional licensing.
• Support is email/ticket-based with slower TAT.

Best for

Enterprise DevOps and SRE teams needing end-to-end application and user monitoring with advanced dashboarding and synthetic testing — particularly in SaaS, eCommerce, or banking.

Pricing & Customer Reviews

• Pricing: Starts at $99/month for standard users; $400+/month for full-platform access. Data ingestion cost of $0.35/GB
• Retention: 30 days by default; more at additional cost
• User licensing: Based on access level (basic, core, full)
• Customer Feedback: Praised for deep APM capabilities but often criticized for cost and vendor lock-in
• G2 Rating: 4.4/5

Top 7 New Relic Alternatives

1. CubeAPM Overview

Known for:

Want a robust APM that collects Telemetry data from applications and infrastructure, an exceptional UI, safeguards data, and utilizes metrics and logs for actionable insights? Then CubeAPM is your go-to Application Performance Monitoring (APM) platform.

OpenTelemetry-native observability platform: A modern, OpenTelemetry-native observability platform that’s built for cost-efficiency, self-hosting, and full support for the MELT stack — making it a top New Relic alternative for cloud-native and compliance-driven teams.

CubeAPM is engineered to collect telemetry data from applications and infrastructure, processing data locally rather than sending to third parties over the internet, achieving a 2–4x faster page load, compared to cloud-based APM alternatives. It also stands out for its smart sampling capabilities, which employ deep context to make sampling decisions, achieving a high signal-to-noise ratio and handling high incoming traffic while consuming fewer resources. It excels in utilizing traces and metrics to deliver actionable insights and proactive issue resolution.

Supports Out-of-the-box monitoring of all AWS Components: It supports monitoring of all popular infrastructure components, including K8s, Redis, Kafka, MySQL, MS SQL, and many more. It also provides automated support of all the AWS components including EC2, EBS, RDS, Dynamodb, and Lambda. This remarkable capability sets it apart from other code review bots.

Key Features

1. OpenTelemetry & Prometheus Native

CubeAPM is fully compatible with OpenTelemetry and Prometheus, allowing seamless integration with existing pipelines. It also supports New Relic and Datadog agents for frictionless migration CubeAPM Deck.

2. Full MELT Stack Support

It includes APM, logs, metrics, traces, RUM, error tracking, and synthetic monitoring — all in one suite, without modular pricing CubeAPM vs New Relic.

3. Smart Sampling for Efficiency

CubeAPM uses contextual sampling (based on latency and errors) to reduce unhelpful trace data — offering better precision and lower cost than New Relic’s basic sampling.

4. On-Prem Deployment & Compliance

Unlike cloud-only tools, CubeAPM supports self-hosted and private cloud deployments. It helps organizations meet GDPR, SOC2, and HIPAA requirements.

5. Fast Setup & Agent Compatibility

Deployable in under 1 hour, with built-in support for existing New Relic, Datadog, and OTEL agents — making tool migration simple.

6. Developer-First Support

Support is available over Slack and WhatsApp with direct access to the engineering team, offering responses in minutes — not days.

Standout Features

• 60–80% more affordable than New Relic
• No per-user licensing fees (unlimited users)
• On-prem and cloud deployment flexibility
• Smart trace sampling to lower ingestion costs
• Full-stack observability out-of-the-box.
• Customer support via Slack in minutes

Pros

• Transparent, usage-based pricing
• Unlimited retention and user accounts
• Fast onboarding and easy migration
• Friendly, developer-first support

Cons

• Smaller integration ecosystem
• Less brand recognition vs legacy vendors

Best for

Tech-savvy mid-size teams, regulated industries, and engineering organizations that need self-hosting, cost control, and OTEL compatibility without sacrificing depth of observability.

Pricing & Customer Reviews

• $0.15/GB for ingestion
• No per-user fees
• Unlimited retention included
• Rating: 4.7/5 (based on pilot programs, Slack feedback, and demos)

CubeAPM vs New Relic

CubeAPM offers nearly identical core functionality to New Relic — including full APM, logs, RUM, and synthetics — but at a fraction of the cost and with far more deployment flexibility. While New Relic relies on a cloud-only model with per-user pricing, CubeAPM enables self-hosting, smart sampling, and Slack-based support, making it ideal for modern, cost-sensitive teams looking to escape vendor lock-in.

3. Datadog Overview

Known for:

A robust, cloud-native observability platform widely used for infrastructure monitoring, application performance tracking, and security analytics — especially in large-scale Kubernetes and microservices environments.

Key Features

1. Deep Infrastructure & Host Monitoring

Datadog provides detailed infrastructure visibility with built-in dashboards for hosts, containers, and cloud services. It offers over 900+ integrations across AWS, Azure, GCP, and SaaS tools.

2. APM & Distributed Tracing

Its APM module enables distributed tracing across services but uses standard probabilistic sampling rather than intelligent prioritization, which can lead to missed signals in high-throughput systems.

3. Logs, Metrics, and Real User Monitoring

Datadog supports full MELT observability (Metrics, Events, Logs, Traces) and includes modules for RUM and frontend performance monitoring. Logs are priced separately and can become costly at scale.

4. Watchdog AI & Anomaly Detection

Watchdog is Datadog’s ML-powered module that detects performance anomalies automatically. It offers real-time issue correlation and context-aware insights.

5. Synthetic Monitoring & CI Visibility

Includes browser tests, API checks, and integration with CI/CD pipelines to catch issues before they reach production.

Standout Features

• Massive integration library (900+ services)
• Strong Kubernetes-native support
• Built-in anomaly detection with Watchdog AI
• Full-stack coverage: infra, APM, logs, synthetics, RUM
• Granular role-based access control (RBAC) and dashboards

Pros

• Comprehensive observability across all layers
• Native support for most cloud and DevOps tools
• Rich dashboarding and alerting options
• Watchdog AI helps detect outlier behavior without setup

Cons

• Expensive at scale: $15–$60/user + usage-based charges
• Sampling is basic (probabilistic, not contextual)
• No self-hosted version is available.
• Data transfer and log ingestion costs can escalate quickly.
• Alert fatigue can occur due to volume-based pricing

Best for

Large engineering organizations running cloud-native, containerized workloads that need unified visibility across applications, infrastructure, and security, and are less cost-sensitive.

Pricing & Customer Reviews

• APM: $16–$42/host/month
• Infra Monitoring: $7–$18/host/month
• Serverless: $15/million invocations
• Synthetic Monitoring: $7.20 per 10K runs
• Logs: Datadog’s log management involves two costs: $0.1 for ingesting logs and $1.7 for indexing them. While logs can be ingested for storage, they become truly useful for analysis and monitoring only when indexed. Therefore, to leverage your logs effectively, the total functional cost is the sum of both ingest and indexing charges with effective cost of $0.1/GB + $1.7/M events (15d)
• G2 Rating: 4.4/5
  • Users complain about billing complexity, unpredictable charges, and log overages.

Datadog vs New Relic

Both Datadog and New Relic offer robust observability across metrics, logs, and traces. However, Datadog excels in integration depth (900+ tools) and modular observability for modern DevOps stacks. Yet, its pricing model is notoriously complex, with charges across hosts, custom metrics, and retention—making it unpredictable at scale. Datadog’s cost can grow exponentially with telemetry usage and dashboards. New Relic, while slightly more transparent with its usage + seat-based pricing, still faces similar cost creep issues and limited control over ingest volume. Both tools are SaaS-only and offer limited support for OpenTelemetry-native observability

4. Dynatrace Overview

Known for:

An advanced observability platform with a strong focus on AI-driven monitoring, automatic discovery, and root cause analysis — powered by its proprietary OneAgent and Davis AI engine.

Key Features

1. OneAgent for Auto-Instrumentation

Dynatrace simplifies deployment with a single agent (OneAgent) that automatically detects applications, services, processes, and containers. This eliminates the need for configuring multiple agents manually.

2. Davis AI for Root Cause Detection

The built-in Davis AI engine correlates metrics, traces, and logs to pinpoint the root causes of performance issues. It also powers predictive alerts and proactive anomaly detection.

3. APM, Infrastructure, and Cloud Monitoring

Dynatrace supports full APM with distributed tracing, infrastructure monitoring, and cloud observability for AWS, Azure, and GCP. It provides deep visibility into service topology, response times, and database performance.

4. Kubernetes & Serverless Support

Designed with Kubernetes in mind, Dynatrace monitors containerized environments with pod-level metrics and automatic mapping. It also supports Lambda and other serverless platforms.

5. SLO Management & Service Maps

Includes native SLO dashboards, service-level health scores, and intelligent alerting. The Smartscape view maps services and dependencies in real-time.

Standout Features

• Davis AI engine for real-time root cause analysis
• Single-agent deployment for APM + infra + logs
• Dynamic topology mapping (Smartscape)
• Built-in SLO management and impact scoring
• Predictive problem detection and anomaly alerts

Pros

• Excellent AI/ML-powered insights
• Highly automated instrumentation and discovery
• Unified MELT coverage with minimal manual config
• Accurate and proactive incident detection

Cons

• Closed-source OneAgent; limited flexibility with OTEL
• Costly, especially at scale
• Learning curve for advanced dashboards and Smartscape
• Limited self-hosting or open deployment options

Best for

Enterprise teams needing high-level automation, AI-driven root cause detection, and seamless observability across large-scale Kubernetes or hybrid environments.

Pricing & Customer Reviews

• Infra + APM pricing is typically $21–$45/host/month.
• Serverless,  logs, and custom metrics are charged separately.
• AI and Smartscape are included in the base platform.
• G2 Rating: 4.5/5
• Customers praise its automation and AI but note that licensing is complex and custom integrations are less flexible than OTEL-native tools.

Dynatrace vs New Relic

Dynatrace sets itself apart with Davis AI for automated root cause analysis and Smartscape topology mapping, making it stronger for large-scale enterprises prioritizing automation. Compared to New Relic, Dynatrace provides deeper AI-powered automation, security observability, and more native context correlation. However, Dynatrace is built on a DDU-based billing model, which is even more complex than New Relic’s, and lacks any self-hosted option. New Relic has broader dashboarding flexibility (via NRQL), while Dynatrace wins on AI-powered insights—but both tools are SaaS-only, premium-priced, and involve steep learning curves.

5. Coralogix Overview

Known for:

A log-first observability platform offering advanced stream processing, customizable log pipelines, and OpenTelemetry-based ingestion. Designed for teams prioritizing log analytics, pipeline flexibility, and cost optimization—though with trade-offs on full-stack observability and compliance.

Key Features

1. Log-Centric Observability Pipeline

Coralogix is centered on logs, offering real-time parsing, enrichment, and routing. Teams can build ingest pipelines to direct logs to visualization, storage, or third-party systems—without always indexing them.

2. OpenTelemetry & Prometheus Compatibility

Supports native OTEL ingestion along with Prometheus metrics. This enables flexible integration into modern, cloud-native environments—though OTEL coverage is still maturing compared to OTEL-first platforms.

3. Streama™ for Cost-Optimized Log Management

Coralogix’s Streama allows users to decouple log indexing from storage, sending non-critical logs to cold storage or directly to their own cloud—minimizing indexing cost while retaining searchability where needed.

4. Anomaly Detection & ML Alerts

Includes behavioral and statistical anomaly detection. Alerts can be routed to incident platforms based on dynamic thresholds, usage spikes, or structured field values.

Standout Features

• Streama™ engine reduces log indexing cost.
• Strong support for OTEL + Prometheus
• Fine-grained log control and routing
• Cloud-native pipeline customization
• Integration with Snowflake and S3 for analytics & compliance

Pros

• Great for teams that are log-heavy or cost-sensitive
• Excellent OTEL and stream processing support
• Flexible, usage-based pricing models
• Fast ingestion and indexing control at the pipeline level

Cons

• Archived data flows through Coralogix first, incurring egress costs
• Not compliant with strict data localization laws due to outbound routing
• APM and tracing less mature than competitors
• No built-in RUM or synthetic monitoring
• UI and UX heavily tuned for logs—not full MELT visibility

Best for

Engineering and DevSecOps teams with high-volume logs who want control over routing, storage cost, and external archival—but can tolerate trade-offs in compliance and end-to-end tracing depth.

Pricing & Customer Reviews

• Pricing is usage-based with log, metrics, and tracing tiers.
• Streama helps lower total costs by reducing indexing waste.
• Free developer tier available
• G2 Rating: 4.6/5
• Users love the pipeline flexibility and cost savings, but note that APM depth is still maturing.

Coralogix vs New Relic

Coralogix is a log-first observability platform with a stream-processing architecture that enables teams to route logs for visualization or archiving without indexing, reducing cost. A standout feature is that archived logs can be stored in the customer’s own cloud storage, resulting in long-term cost savings. However, this model still incurs public cloud egress costs, and because the data flows through Coralogix first, it violates strict data localization policies. Compared to New Relic, Coralogix offers better log routing efficiency and ingest flexibility, but lacks New Relic’s broader application and infrastructure visibility.

6. Splunk AppDynamics Overview

Known for:

A traditional enterprise APM solution focused on business transaction monitoring, code-level diagnostics, and integration with Cisco’s IT and security stack.

Key Features

1. Business Transaction Monitoring

AppDynamics maps application flows to business transactions, making it easy to trace performance issues to specific user journeys or service chains.

2. Deep Code-Level Diagnostics

Offers detailed diagnostics with call graphs, memory usage, and database performance visibility — particularly useful for Java, .NET, and PHP applications.

3. Infrastructure & Database Monitoring

Tracks infrastructure metrics alongside APM and includes database monitoring to help isolate backend slowdowns.

4. Synthetic and Real User Monitoring (RUM)

Supports synthetic tests for uptime and performance and collects real user insights to visualize frontend behavior across regions and devices.

5. Cisco SecureX Integration

Being part of the Cisco family, AppDynamics integrates with Cisco SecureX for unified security visibility across performance and threat metrics.

Standout Features

• Strong APM and transaction diagnostics for legacy apps
• Integration with Cisco tools for hybrid IT and security
• Mature platform trusted by Fortune 500 enterprises
• On-prem enterprise deployment available

Pros

• Deep diagnostics with code-level visibility
• Powerful transaction flow visualizations
• Robust support for legacy enterprise environments
• Cisco integration adds value for hybrid teams.

Cons

• High cost; pricing not transparent
• Agent-heavy and complex to configure
• Limited OpenTelemetry and Prometheus support
• No native error tracking or built-in smart sampling

Best for

Large enterprises using the Cisco ecosystem or those monitoring monolithic applications and legacy stacks, where deep transaction tracing is essential.

Pricing & Customer Reviews

• Enterprise pricing starts in the $300–$600/month range per host/user.
• Requires annual contracts and dedicated account support
• On-prem deployment available for large-scale IT teams
• G2 Rating: 4.3/5
• Users appreciate its code-level depth but criticize its complexity, cost, and lack of modern telemetry support.

Splunk AppDynamics vs New Relic

Splunk AppDynamics is built for deep application diagnostics and business transaction monitoring, offering strong value for teams looking to correlate performance with business KPIs. While New Relic also offers custom dashboards and application tracing, AppDynamics integrates more tightly with Cisco’s security and infrastructure stack. AppDynamics supports on-premise deployment, unlike New Relic’s SaaS-only model. That said, AppDynamics is seen as legacy-heavy in UI/UX and less suitable for agile or cloud-native teams, while New Relic tends to be more developer-friendly and faster to deploy in modern environments.

6. Grafana Overview

Known for:

An open-source platform best known for its custom dashboards, visualizations, and data source flexibility — widely used in observability stacks built around Prometheus, Loki, and Tempo.

Key Features

1. Flexible Dashboarding & Data Sources

Grafana supports dozens of backends, including Prometheus, InfluxDB, Elasticsearch, Graphite, and Google BigQuery. Dashboards can be deeply customized with variables, transformations, and panels.

2. Metrics Monitoring via Prometheus

When paired with Prometheus, Grafana becomes a powerful time-series monitoring solution with alerting, trend analysis, and historical comparisons.

3. Loki for Logs & Tempo for Traces

Grafana offers its own log and tracing solutions — Loki (for logs) and Tempo (for distributed tracing). This enables users to create a fully integrated MELT stack if configured manually.

4. Self-Hosted or Grafana Cloud

Grafana OSS is fully self-hostable and free to use. For hosted deployments, Grafana Cloud provides managed infrastructure with alerting, RUM (via Faro), and team collaboration features.

5. Plugin Ecosystem & Community

Thousands of plugins exist for visualization types, data sources, and integrations, making Grafana highly extensible.

Standout Features

• Fully customizable visualizations and dashboards
• Native integration with Prometheus, Loki, and Tempo
• Free and open-source deployment model
• Massive community and plugin ecosystem
• Grafana Cloud adds optional managed services.

Pros

• Best-in-class visualization tools
• Full control over dashboard creation and layout
• Open-source and self-hosted (free) options
• Strong community and plugin support
• Works with any backend that exposes metrics/logs

Cons

• Not a full APM solution out-of-the-box
• Requires manual integration with backend telemetry stacks
• No built-in smart sampling or alert correlation
• Grafana Cloud can get expensive with high usage.

Best for

Teams that want to build their observability stack or need a powerful, vendor-agnostic dashboard layer over Prometheus, Loki, or other data sources.

Pricing & Customer Reviews

• Grafana OSS: Free
• Grafana Cloud: Starts at $19/month for Pro plan and $299/month for Advanced plan (includes hosted metrics, logs, and traces)
• Pricing grows based on ingestion/retention.
• G2 Rating: 4.5/5
• Users love the visualization power but mention that backend management and integration can be complex.

Grafana vs New Relic

Grafana is an open-source favorite for teams who want total control over dashboarding and data sources. With integrations for Prometheus, Loki, and Tempo, it enables cost-efficient observability—but requires DIY setup and manual scaling. In contrast, New Relic offers out-of-the-box dashboards and powerful NRQL for telemetry queries, but at higher cost and with less flexibility for custom pipelines. Grafana supports self-hosting and OSS freedoms, while New Relic is SaaS-only. For teams wanting fast startup and less config, New Relic wins—but for power users, Grafana’s freedom is unmatched.

7. Sentry Overview

Known for:

A developer-focused platform for real-time error monitoring, exception tracking, and performance profiling — especially popular in frontend, mobile, and backend app environments.

Key Features

1. Real-Time Error Monitoring & Stack Traces

Sentry tracks unhandled exceptions and performance bottlenecks, showing stack traces, user context, and breadcrumbs to help developers debug faster.

2. Frontend & Backend SDKs

Supports a wide range of SDKs for JavaScript, React, Python, Node.js, PHP, Go, iOS, and Android, making it ideal for full-stack dev teams.

3. Performance Monitoring & Tracing

While not a full APM, Sentry offers basic distributed tracing and latency tracking, helping teams measure performance at the route or transaction level.

4. Issue Grouping & Notifications

Errors are grouped by root cause and enriched with metadata. Integrations with Slack, Jira, Microsoft Teams, and GitHub make it easy to trigger fixes.

5. Self-Hosting Option

Sentry offers an open-source, self-hosted version alongside its cloud-hosted offering, appealing to companies that require local deployment.

Standout Features

• Dev-centric debugging with full stack trace context
• Easy setup for web/mobile apps using SDKs
• Clean UI for engineers, PMs, and QA
• Self-hostable OSS version available
• Git-based releases and source maps for frontend visibility

Pros

• Fast issue resolution with real-time alerting
• Deep support for JavaScript and mobile SDKs
• Excellent developer UX
• Easy onboarding for small and mid-sized teams

Cons

• Not a full APM: lacks infra and deep backend metric
• No support for logs, Kubernetes, or server metrics
• Limited tracing and no smart sampling
• Requires add-ons for performance insights at scale

Best for

Product engineering teams looking for frontend and backend error visibility, with seamless workflows into issue tracking and CI/CD.

Pricing & Customer Reviews

• Free tier available
• Paid plans start at $26/month.
• Self-hosting via Docker is also supported.
• G2 Rating: 4.6/5
• Users praise Sentry for its fast debugging and ease of integration, but note it lacks full-stack observability.

Sentry vs New Relic

Sentry is a developer-centric tool built for error tracking, performance monitoring, and code-linked issue resolution. It’s ideal for frontend/backend teams wanting to trace bugs and monitor performance with Git integration. Compared to New Relic, which offers broader MELT stack observability, Sentry is more targeted at developers and product engineers, not SRE or infra teams. It also offers a self-hosted OSS version, whereas New Relic does not. While Sentry lacks full infrastructure observability, it excels at error triaging and debugging, making it a great complementary tool to platforms like New Relic.

Conclusion: Choosing the Right New Relic Alternative

As observability needs evolve, it’s clear that teams are moving away from high-cost, cloud-only platforms like New Relic toward more open, cost-transparent, and flexible alternatives. Whether it’s to cut licensing costs, embrace OpenTelemetry, or gain control over data residency, the market offers powerful tools tailored for different use cases.

Why CubeAPM Leads the Pack

Among all New Relic alternatives, CubeAPM stands out for its OpenTelemetry-first architecture, 60–80% cost savings, unlimited user model, and on-premise support. It delivers full MELT observability (APM, logs, infra, synthetics, RUM) out of the box and is built to support modern DevOps workflows — from smart sampling to Slack-based support in minutes.

Whether you’re moving away from New Relic due to cost, cloud lock-in, or OpenTelemetry needs, CubeAPM offers a frictionless, developer-friendly, and future-ready path forward.