New Relic alternatives: where to go and how to leave without missing an alert
Six destinations and three add-ons, matched to whatever is driving your bill up.
The short answer: SigNoz if full platform users are what hurts (it charges for none), Grafana Cloud if you want a big free tier on open standards, Datadog if you have lots of engineers and few machines, Dynatrace for a large estate with automatic instrumentation, Better Stack for a small team that wants logs, uptime and on-call in one place, Elastic if you already run Elasticsearch. One thing before you pick: the safest exit is to move your services to OpenTelemetry while still sending to New Relic, then fork the same data to your new tool. We compared these tools against their official 2026 pricing.
Some links are affiliate links. The ranking is editorial: a sponsored placement is always labeled on its card, and no affiliate link changes a score.
Why teams leave New Relic, and what the pricing page hides
New Relic gets a lot right: 100 GB of free ingest a month, no per-host pricing, and NRQL, a query language plenty of engineers genuinely love. People leave over the billing model, and over an exit that takes planning.
User number six is where it gets expensive
A full platform user (access to APM, infrastructure and browser monitoring) costs $10 for the first one, then $99 a month each on Standard. Standard caps out at 5. Past that you need Pro: $349 per user on an annual commitment, $418.80 pay as you go. Five engineers run $406 a month. Six on Pro run $2,094.
One day of access bills as a full month
New Relic bills each user at the highest type they hold in a calendar month (UTC). Bump someone to full platform for a single on-call shift and you pay the whole month. Users become billable the moment they're added, logged in or not. On a contract, two downgrade-and-upgrade round trips in a year keep that person billed as full platform until the term ends.
Data past 100 GB keeps getting pricier
Each GB over the free 100 costs $0.40, or $0.60 with Data Plus. Back in 2022 the same default-retention GB was $0.25, raised to $0.30 at contract renewal. On developer forums, teams describe monitoring that ends up costing more than the servers it watches.
A compute unit with no public price
On Pro and Enterprise, part of your usage runs through Advanced Compute, billed in CCUs: one unit per successful action (a page load, a query, an alert evaluation, an API call). The price per CCU isn't listed. You have to ask sales. Forecasting a bill with an unpriced line item is guesswork.
NRQL lock-in and a crowded UI
NRQL splits opinion. Some call it exceptional, others complain about the learning curve and a UI that keeps stacking features. The real cost shows up when you leave: your dashboards and alert conditions are written in NRQL, and nothing converts them for you.
Short history, and hard to take with you
By default, APM transactions, errors and traces are kept for 8 days, logs for 30. Data Plus extends that to 98 and 120 days. Historical export requires Data Plus too. Without it there's almost nothing to carry over, which actually shortens your migration.
You're leaving because… go to…
Usually one row is about you. Each card jumps to the full write-up below.
Unlimited users, $49 a month with usage included.
You want a generous free tier on open standardsGrafana Cloud50 GB of logs and 50 GB of traces free, 3 users.
You have lots of engineers and few machinesDatadogBilled per host, so headcount doesn't matter.
Big estate, no appetite for manual instrumentationDynatraceAutomatic instrumentation, $58 per 8 GiB host.
Small team: logs, uptime and on-callBetter StackPrague-based vendor with an EU region.
You already live in Elasticsearch or KibanaElastic ObservabilityServerless logs from $0.07 per GB.
New Relic alternatives, tool by tool
For each tool: why to move there, who it fits (and who it doesn't), its catch, how to bring your data over, and its official 2026 price. Every vendor here quotes in US dollars, before tax. The last three cards are specialist add-ons you bolt on rather than swap in.
Grafana Cloud: open building blocks and a free tier many teams never outgrow
Biggest free tierWhy move to Grafana Cloud. You trade a proprietary query language for open source pieces (Prometheus for metrics, Loki for logs, Tempo for traces) that you can self-host whenever you choose. The free tier is wide: 10k metric series, 50 GB of logs, 50 GB of traces, 50 GB of profiles, 14-day retention and 3 users.
Who it fits. An engineering team comfortable with PromQL that wants to see exactly what each line of the invoice pays for.
Who it doesn't. A team that wants APM switched on in two clicks. Here you assemble the pieces yourself.
The catch. The Pro bill has a lot of lines: $19 a month, then $6.50 per 1,000 series, $0.05 per GB processed plus $0.40 per GB written for logs and traces, $0.10 per GB retained, and $8 per active user. Enterprise starts at $25,000 a year.
How to migrate from New Relic. No tool translates NRQL into PromQL, and Grafana offers its professional services for the move. Get your services onto OpenTelemetry, dual-ship to both tools, and rebuild your five most-viewed dashboards first.
- Free
- 50 GB of logs, 3 users
- Paid
- Pro $19/mo + usage
- Billed on
- series, GB, active users
- Catch
- many invoice lines
SigNoz: the straight answer to per-user pricing
No seat pricingWhy move to SigNoz. It's the mirror image of New Relic's model: no user is billed, only usage. SigNoz was built on OpenTelemetry from day one, so the instrumentation work you do to leave New Relic carries over as is.
Who it fits. A startup or mid-size engineering team where everyone wants to look at APM and nobody wants to ration seats.
Who it doesn't. A large organization that expects a feature catalog as long as New Relic's.
The catch. Teams costs $49 a month, with that amount of usage included. After that: $0.30 per GB of logs and traces (15 days) and $0.10 per million metric samples. Enterprise starts at $4,000 a month. Young companies (under 3 years old, under 30 staff, under $6M raised) pay $19 a month for 12 months.
How to migrate from New Relic. SigNoz publishes a dedicated New Relic migration guide: metrics, traces and logs go through the OpenTelemetry Collector, dashboards and alerts get rebuilt by hand. At 300 GB a month the bill comes to $90, however many people log in.
- Free
- self-hosted Community edition
- Paid
- Teams $49/mo, usage included
- Users
- unlimited
- Catch
- narrower catalog
Datadog: when your viewers outnumber your servers
Lots of engineersWhy move to Datadog. Datadog bills per host, not per person. With 20 engineers and 10 machines the math flips: Infrastructure Pro plus APM comes to $46 per host per month on annual billing, so $460 for ten hosts, against $6,980 for 20 Pro users at New Relic. It also has the broadest product catalog on the market.
Who it fits. A large team on a stable fleet that wants everything in one place.
Who it doesn't. The reverse case: three engineers and 40 churning containers. There, New Relic's seat model was cheaper, and some small teams stayed for exactly that reason.
The catch. Logs get billed twice: $0.10 per GB ingested, then $1.70 per million events indexed. The free tier stops at 5 hosts with one day of retention. Teams who moved over from New Relic have also complained about pushy sales follow-ups.
How to migrate from New Relic. Run the Datadog agent side by side on a few hosts, compare a week of traces, then roll it out. Our switch from Datadog guide covers the reverse path, worth knowing before you sign.
- Free
- 5 hosts, 1 day
- Paid
- Infra Pro $15/host, APM $31/host
- Billed on
- hosts
- Catch
- logs billed twice
Dynatrace: automatic instrumentation so you stop wiring agents service by service
Large estatesWhy move to Dynatrace. Dynatrace leans on automatic instrumentation, so there's far less per-service setup. There's no per-user price either: you pay for monitored memory, by the hour.
Who it fits. An enterprise with hundreds of hosts and a dedicated observability team.
Who it doesn't. A startup. The annual minimum commitment and enterprise sales motion are too heavy.
The catch. Full-Stack costs $58 a month per 8 GiB host ($0.01 per GiB-hour), Infrastructure $29, Foundation $7. Logs and traces run $0.20 per GiB. You commit annually after a 15-day trial.
How to migrate from New Relic. Install the Dynatrace agent alongside New Relic on one host group, compare traces for a week, then expand. Your NRQL alerts get rewritten in its alerting engine.
- Free
- no, 15-day trial
- Paid
- Full-Stack $58 per 8 GiB host
- Billed on
- memory, hourly
- Catch
- annual commitment
Better Stack: logs, uptime and on-call from a European vendor
Small teamsWhy move to Better Stack. If New Relic is mostly where you read logs and find out the site is down, Better Stack does both, plus on-call scheduling, in a cleaner interface. The company is based in Prague and offers an EU region.
Who it fits. A team of 2 to 10 people, at a SaaS or an agency, that wants to get paged at the right moment without juggling three tools.
Who it doesn't. A team that lives in distributed traces and deep APM. The feature exists, it's just shallower.
The catch. The free plan includes 3 GB of logs and 3 GB of traces (3 days), 30 GB of metrics and 10 monitors. Each on-call responder costs $29 a month billed annually ($34 monthly). In the EU region, logs and traces cost $0.10 per GB plus $0.05 per GB per month of retention.
How to migrate from New Relic. Start with logs, then rebuild your uptime monitors, then your on-call rotations. If uptime monitoring is part of the decision, see our switch from UptimeRobot and switch from Pingdom guides.
- Free
- 3 GB of logs, 10 monitors
- Paid
- on-call $29/mo, annual
- Best for
- logs + uptime
- Catch
- shallower APM
Elastic Observability: stay on Elasticsearch without running clusters
Already on ELKWhy move to Elastic. If your application logs already sit in Elasticsearch and Kibana, adding APM from the same vendor saves you a tool. The serverless version bills by the GB, with no cluster to size.
Who it fits. A team that already writes Elasticsearch queries and wants log search and monitoring under one roof.
Who it doesn't. A small team with no Elasticsearch experience. The learning curve is steeper than New Relic's.
The catch. Logs Essentials starts at $0.07 per GB ingested and $0.017 per GB retained per month. The Complete tier (logs, traces, metrics) starts at $0.09 per GB for logs and traces. There's no permanent free tier, though 50 GB of egress is included.
How to migrate from New Relic. Put its agents on one service first, compare the traces with New Relic, and rebuild your dashboards in Kibana.
- Free
- no
- Paid
- logs from $0.07/GB
- Billed on
- GB ingested and retained
- Catch
- steeper learning curve
Honeycomb: for digging into high-cardinality traces
Add-on: tracesWhy add it. Honeycomb is built for asking pointed questions of your traces (this customer, this build, this region) without pre-built indexes. It complements a metrics tool. It doesn't replace the whole New Relic platform.
Its catch and price. The free plan covers 20 million events a month. Pro starts at $150 a month.
- Free
- 20M events/mo
- Paid
- Pro from $150/mo
- Role
- deep tracing
Sentry: if New Relic was really just your error tracker
Add-on: errorsWhy add it. Plenty of small teams pay for full or core seats just to read the errors inbox. Sentry handles that job for a flat price.
Its catch and price. Developer is free, Team is $29 a month ($26 annually), Business $89 ($80). Our switch from Sentry guide covers where it falls short.
- Free
- Developer plan
- Paid
- Team $29/mo
- Role
- application errors
Coroot: see your services without touching the code
Add-on: no code changesWhy add it. Coroot uses eBPF (a way to observe traffic from inside the Linux kernel) to map your services with no in-code agent. Handy mid-migration, while some services haven't moved to OpenTelemetry yet.
Its catch and price. Community is free. Standard costs $1 per CPU core per month.
- Free
- Community edition
- Paid
- $1 per core/mo
- Role
- service map, no code
New Relic and its alternatives side by side
The right pick depends on what you have more of: people or machines. Take two teams. Team one has 8 engineers and 10 hosts. New Relic Pro costs it $2,792 a month before any data, Datadog (infrastructure plus APM) $460, SigNoz $49 plus usage. Team two has 3 engineers and 40 hosts. New Relic Standard comes to $208 a month, Datadog to $1,840. The table shows what each tool bills on and how you get there.
| What you pay for, entry price | The catch, and how to migrate | |
|---|---|---|
| New RelicWhere you're starting | Free 100 GB; $0.40/GB after; full user $99 (Standard, max 5) or $349 (Pro) | Price jump at user six; historical export needs Data Plus |
| Grafana CloudBig free tier | Free 50 GB of logs; Pro $19/mo + usage | Many invoice lines; OpenTelemetry Collector, dashboards rebuilt |
| SigNozNo seats | Teams $49/mo, usage included; $0.30/GB | Narrower catalog; published New Relic migration guide |
| DatadogLots of engineers | Infra Pro $15/host, APM $31/host (annual) | Logs billed on ingest and indexing; agent run side by side |
| DynatraceLarge estates | Full-Stack $58 per 8 GiB host | Annual commitment; parallel agent, alerts rewritten |
| Better StackSmall teams | Free 3 GB; on-call $29/mo annual | Shallower APM; logs first, then monitors |
| ElasticAlready on ELK | Serverless logs from $0.07/GB | No permanent free tier; dashboards rebuilt in Kibana |
Official prices in US dollars, before tax, subject to change. Monthly figures exclude ingested data. Run the numbers on your real users, hosts and GB.
Switch from New Relic in eight steps
The rule: never go dark. The first three steps happen inside New Relic, before you've even picked a destination. They cut the bill right away and keep the whole move reversible.
Find out what you're actually paying for
Week 1Open the usage page and write down three numbers: users by type (basic, core, full platform), GB ingested per month by source, and how much of it is Data Plus. Then list your agents per service, the dashboards people actually open, and your NRQL alert conditions.
That sheet picks the destination for you. If the bill is driven by people, go seatless. If it's driven by GB, go cheaper per GB.
- Time
- half a day
- Output
- users, GB, alerts
Downgrade the seats nobody needs
Instant savingsA free basic user can run queries, build their own dashboards and get basic alerts. A core user, at $49, adds the errors inbox and the logs UI. Find the people who only look at dashboards and move them down a tier.
Do it at the start of the month, since billing follows the highest type held that month. On a contract, don't bounce the same person up and down: after the second round trip in a year, they stay billed as full platform until the term ends.
- Savings
- up to $99 or $349 per person per month
- Trap
- two round trips on contract
Move your services to OpenTelemetry while staying on New Relic
The real workNew Relic ingests OTLP natively: https://otlp.nr-data.net in the US, https://otlp.eu01.nr-data.net in the EU, on ports 443, 4317 or 4318, with your license key in the api-key header. http/protobuf is the recommended format.
Swap the New Relic agents out one service at a time and compare the data inside New Relic itself. You're not changing tools yet, just the wiring. If something breaks, put the old agent back.
- Payload limit
- 1 MB per batch
- Risk
- low, fully reversible
Fork the same data to your destination
Add a second exporter to your OpenTelemetry Collector so data flows to New Relic and to the new tool. You compare both on the same traces, the same logs, the same traffic. This is also when you find out what the destination really costs, on a real month.
- Suggested length
- one full billing cycle
Export dashboards as JSON, then rebuild them
Every New Relic dashboard exports to JSON from the UI, and Terraform manages them with the newrelic_one_dashboard_json resource. Keep those files: they document every NRQL query. Nothing converts them, so rebuild your five most-used dashboards first and let the rest go.
- Format
- JSON or Terraform
- Conversion
- manual
Rebuild alerts on a separate channel
No duplicatesRewrite your NRQL conditions in the destination's language, but route its alerts to their own channel (a dedicated Slack channel, nobody paged). While you dual-ship, your team won't get every incident twice. Once the new alerts fire at the same moments as New Relic's for two weeks, hook them up to on-call.
- Cutover test
- two weeks with no gaps
Decide what to do with historical data
Without Data Plus, APM transactions only live 8 days, so there's nothing to save and dual-shipping covers you. With Data Plus, historical export goes through NerdGraph (New Relic's GraphQL API): under 200 million events per export, two exports at a time, SELECT * queries only, gzipped JSON files kept for a week and links valid for 6 hours. Don't buy Data Plus just to export. Screenshot your yearly dashboards instead.
- Without Data Plus
- 8 days of APM, 30 days of logs
- Export
- Data Plus required
Drop to the free tier, then close
TimingOn pay as you go, you can downgrade to free yourself from Manage your plan, under Plans and pricing. On a Pro or Enterprise contract, you go through sales, so note your end date today. Cancelling the account deactivates every API key, and you can't undo it from the UI. Pull the last agents first, then close.
- Pay as you go
- self-serve downgrade
- On contract
- through sales
Is your tool missing from this page? Email us: hello@hackceleration.com
What makes a New Relic migration go wrong
These mistakes keep coming up from teams who left, and from teams who came back. None of them depends on which destination you pick.
Re-instrumenting everything at once
One CTO describes months of wasted work trying to save on New Relic, before admitting the product was really good. Move to OpenTelemetry one service at a time, still on New Relic, so every step can be rolled back.
Comparing per-GB prices and forgetting seats
$0.30 at SigNoz versus $0.40 at New Relic looks like a small gap. The real gap is $349 per Pro user. Always add up people, hosts and GB over a real month.
Shuffling seats on a contract
Upgrade an engineer for on-call and downgrade them again, twice in a year, and they're billed as full platform until the term ends. Set seats once, at the start of the month.
Turning New Relic off before alerts are proven
One missed production alert costs more than a month of paying for both tools. Wait for two weeks of matching alerts before you unplug.
Assuming history migrates
Without Data Plus, there's no historical export. Accept the retention you have and start dual-shipping early, so the destination builds its own history by cutover day.
Switching tools to escape a sales team
Teams who left for Datadog later complained about its sales follow-ups. If the relationship is the problem, negotiate first. A contract renewal is the best moment to do it.
- Users by type and monthly GB written down
- Unused seats downgraded at the start of the month
- Services on OpenTelemetry, still sending to New Relic
- Dual-shipping to the destination for a month
- Dashboards exported as JSON, top five rebuilt
- Two weeks of matching alerts before cutover
- Contract end date noted
New Relic alternatives: frequently asked questions
What is the cheapest alternative to New Relic?
For a team with lots of users, SigNoz: Teams is $49 a month with usage included and no seat fees, so 300 GB a month comes to $90 total. For a team with lots of hosts and few users, New Relic itself may already be the cheapest option, since it doesn't charge per host. Price your actual mix before you move.
Is there a free or open-source New Relic alternative?
Yes. SigNoz Community edition, the Grafana stack (Prometheus, Loki, Tempo) and Coroot Community all run on your own servers. The software is free, operating it isn't: storage, upgrades and backups become your job. If you'd rather not self-host, Grafana Cloud's free tier gives you 50 GB of logs, 50 GB of traces and 3 users.
New Relic vs Datadog: which one costs less?
It depends on your ratio of people to machines. New Relic doesn't bill per host, Datadog doesn't bill per user. With 3 engineers and 40 hosts, New Relic runs $208 a month in seats against $1,840 at Datadog. With 8 engineers and 10 hosts, it flips: $2,792 against $460. Our switch from Datadog guide gives the other side.
How much does a New Relic user cost?
A basic user is free and a core user is $49 a month. A full platform user is $10 for the first, then $99 each on Standard, up to 5. Beyond that you need Pro: $349 a month on an annual commitment, $418.80 pay as you go. Users count from the moment they're added, even if they never log in.
How do I migrate off New Relic without losing data?
Move your services to OpenTelemetry while still sending to New Relic, then add a second exporter that ships the same data to your new tool. Run both for at least a full billing cycle. Your history mostly can't come along unless you're on Data Plus, so the parallel run is what builds history in the destination.
Can New Relic keep my data in the EU?
Yes. There's an EU region, chosen when you create the account, at $0.05 more per GB per month stored. Account and billing data is still processed in the US. If you want a European vendor, Better Stack is based in Prague, and SigNoz also offers an EU region.
What's the best New Relic alternative for Kubernetes?
Count pods against people first. With many pods and few engineers, New Relic's seat model can stay cheap, and the bill is driven by GB: SigNoz at $0.30 per GB or Grafana Cloud's free 50 GB of logs are the natural comparisons. If you'd rather not instrument every service, Coroot maps services through eBPF with no code changes, at $1 per CPU core per month on Standard.
Which alternative should I pick if I only need error tracking?
Sentry. Team costs $29 a month for the whole team, while New Relic asks for a core user at $49 per person to use the errors inbox. Read our switch from Sentry guide for its own limits, and switch from Splunk if heavy log volumes are the real issue.
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