Buyer’s Guide - October 2026

11 New Relic alternatives that fix the reason you are leaving

Q: Can I self-host a New Relic alternative?

Yes: SigNoz, ClickStack, Coroot, Elastic (self-managed), Sentry (self-hosted edition) and Netdata agents all run on your own infrastructure. Self-hosting shifts cost from licence to operations - sizing, upgrades, scaling and availability become your responsibility. Netdata also offers Enterprise On-Prem for air-gapped environments.

Q: Is Grafana a full New Relic replacement?

Grafana Cloud covers metrics, logs and traces well and is the most common open-ecosystem landing spot for teams leaving New Relic. It is an assembled stack (Prometheus, Loki, Tempo) rather than one integrated product, so correlation and root-cause workflows differ from New Relic’s. Usage-based billing on ingest and retention can also reproduce New Relic-style cost surprises at scale.

Q: What tools are similar to New Relic?

Datadog is the closest match - APM, logs, RUM, synthetics and security - and usually costs more than New Relic. Dynatrace matches the enterprise APM depth with stronger AI root-cause analysis and unlimited seats, under an annual-commitment model. New Relic’s remaining differentiators versus both are its single pricing model and its free tier.

Most teams leave New Relic over the bill. Ingest plus per-user pricing means costs climb with telemetry volume and headcount, and a naive switch to another usage-billed platform can reproduce the same bill with a different logo. This ranking grades every candidate on the full signal set (metrics, logs, traces, errors, RUM), the shape of its pricing, and how cleanly your OpenTelemetry instrumentation moves with you.

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11 New Relic alternatives that fix the reason you are leaving product interface

Why this list exists

New Relic earned its reputation honestly. It is a genuinely all-in-one observability platform: mature APM language agents with deep code-level visibility, NRQL (a well-documented query language with a large body of community dashboards), 50+ capabilities under one pricing model, and a free tier generous enough to evaluate for real. If you have never been surprised by a New Relic invoice, this page is not for you.

The reasons teams leave cluster tightly. The bill grows with data ingest plus per-user seats (or compute plus ingest), so costs spike with telemetry volume and engineering headcount at the same time. Practitioners describe the product suite as a maze, and the per-seat line item reads as a tax on giving every engineer access to observability data. The closed ecosystem sits awkwardly next to an industry that has standardized on OpenTelemetry. For a deeper side-by-side on the leading option, see our detailed Netdata vs New Relic comparison.

What you give up by moving is real: the vendor-supported language agents, NRQL and every dashboard and alert you have built on it, and a single enterprise contract. None of your historical data migrates, so plan a dual-run period no matter which direction you go.

Three dimensions decide which alternative is right:

Pricing shape. What does the bill grow with - ingest, hosts, seats, cores, compute? The top reason teams leave New Relic is cost predictability, and several alternatives reproduce the same usage-based trap with a different logo.
Signal completeness. New Relic is bought as all-in-one. A replacement that covers traces beautifully but ignores infrastructure and logs means a two-vendor stack, which may still be the right answer, but know it going in.
Deployment and data control. SaaS, self-hosted, or BYOC determines where telemetry lives and who operates the storage. Open source is a distribution model, not a price: self-hosted shifts cost from licence to operations.

One note on how we handle pricing: we do not quote competitor list prices. Rates change, discounts are negotiated, and a copied dollar figure would be stale the week you read it. We describe the pricing shape - what the meter counts - and link every vendor’s official pricing page so you can model your own numbers.

We assembled the shortlist of New Relic competitors from the tools practitioners actually evaluate as replacements: the platforms cited in vendor and community comparisons and engineering forum threads. Every candidate had to be a credible full-stack or near-full-stack replacement; single-purpose uptime checkers did not qualify.

Three criteria carry the most weight because they map to the three reasons teams leave: full-stack signal coverage (New Relic is bought as all-in-one), OpenTelemetry compatibility and migration effort (your instrumentation should survive the switch), and pricing predictability (the bill should grow with something you control, not something that grows on its own).

Tester credit

Compiled by the Netdata team - Updated October 14, 2026

Sources verified

Scoring criteria

Full-stack signal coverage 20%
Metrics, logs, traces, errors and RUM in one platform; single-signal tools lose points.
OpenTelemetry compatibility and migration effort 20%
How cleanly OTel instrumentation repoints, and how much query/dashboard work must be rebuilt.
Pricing predictability and total cost 20%
What the bill grows with, and how surprising it is at scale.
Data control and deployment options 15%
SaaS vs self-hosted vs BYOC; where telemetry is stored.
Time to insight 10%
Auto-instrumentation, data resolution, auto-dashboards, anomaly detection, AI root-cause.
Scale, cardinality and retention 10%
Behaviour under high-cardinality telemetry and affordable history.
Ecosystem and integrations 5%
Agent and SDK coverage, integrations library, community.

Vendor 01 / 11 · #netdata

Netdata

Per-second, agent-based observability unifying infrastructure metrics, logs and OpenTelemetry traces, with on-node ML anomaly detection and AI root-cause analysis.

Best for

Teams replacing New Relic’s infrastructure and APM monitoring with high-resolution, per-second data and predictable per-node costs
SRE and DevOps teams that want anomaly detection and root-cause analysis without writing queries
Organizations that want telemetry stored on their own infrastructure

Pricing

Per-node pricing: Netdata Cloud Business from $4.5/node/month on annual plans, decreasing as node count grows
Not billed: metrics volume, Logs Monitoring (querying logs in place), users, data retention, containers
Agents are open source (GPLv3+) and free to run; you operate them
Community plan is free for personal, non-commercial use with up to 5 active connected nodes; businesses run the open-source Agent or Netdata Cloud Business (14-day trial)
Logs Management and Traces are marked Free Preview on the price list

Pros

Per-second metric collection by default, far finer than the 15-60s resolution typical of New Relic and most alternatives
Unsupervised ML runs on every node, so anomaly detection adapts as infrastructure changes and raw telemetry never leaves the host
One agent collects metrics, logs (systemd-journal, Windows Event Log, macOS unified logs in place, plus any source via OpenTelemetry Collector) and ingests OpenTelemetry traces over OTLP (gRPC and HTTP)
Traces are stored and indexed on your own agents and explored in the Netdata Cloud Traces tab: duration heatmap, RED analysis, waterfall, span details
Thousands of auto-generated metrics and alerts per node with zero configuration, plus custom dashboards
Predictable per-node pricing that does not grow with ingest volume, users or retention - the inverse of New Relic’s billing dimensions

Honest limitations

Deeper APM features such as code-level and continuous profiling are the strength of suites like Datadog and Dynatrace; Netdata does distributed tracing on OpenTelemetry rather than a full APM suite
No Splunk or Elastic-class full-text log index and query language; log analysis is not a search-engine-class product
Digital Experience Monitoring (RUM and browser synthetic checks) is new as of October 2026; vendors that have offered RUM for years have more mature features such as session replay

Verdict

Netdata leads this list because it fixes the two things that drive most New Relic exits: cost predictability and data resolution. The per-node bill does not move when ingest volume, headcount or retention grows, and per-second collection catches the transient spikes that coarser collection intervals average away. The migration story is clean for OpenTelemetry shops: repoint OTLP exporters at the agent and your metrics, logs and traces land in one place, stored on your own infrastructure. The honest caveats: code-level and continuous profiling are the territory of the full APM suites, and Netdata’s DEM feature set is newer than the incumbents’. For the infrastructure-plus-APM core of a New Relic replacement, nothing else on this list matches the combination of resolution, ML out of the box, and a bill you can forecast.

Try Netdata Cloud -> See Netdata vs New Relic ->

Vendor 02 / 11 · #grafana

Grafana Cloud

Managed observability stack (Prometheus, Loki, Tempo, Grafana dashboards) with the largest visualization and integration ecosystem in the category.

Best for

Teams already using Prometheus or Grafana dashboards that want a managed backend
Organizations standardizing on OpenTelemetry and open-source components
Buyers who value ecosystem breadth over a single vendor agent

Pricing

Usage-based: billed on data processed, ingested and retained across per-GB and per-series dimensions
Free tier with usage and retention caps; paid tiers add a platform fee plus pay-as-you-go usage
Enterprise is an annual-commitment contract with volume pricing
Bill grows with ingest volume and retention length

Pros

De facto standard for dashboards; huge community and integration ecosystem
OpenTelemetry-native ingestion across metrics (Prometheus/Mimir), logs (Loki) and traces (Tempo)
Managed cloud removes the operational burden of running the LGTM stack yourself
Free tier gives full access to the platform with usage caps, useful for evaluation

Cons

Usage-based billing on ingest and retention makes costs hard to predict at scale - the same class of problem buyers are fleeing at New Relic
You assemble the stack yourself: alerting, correlation and root-cause analysis span separate components rather than one integrated product
Self-managed Grafana OSS means operating Prometheus, Loki and Tempo yourself

Verdict

Grafana Cloud is the most common landing spot for teams leaving New Relic, and for Prometheus-centric shops it is the obvious one. Migration means repointing OTel collectors or Prometheus scrapers, replacing New Relic agents with OTel SDKs, and rebuilding NRQL as PromQL, LogQL and TraceQL - a real project, not a flip of a switch. As an all-in-one replacement it is thinner than it looks: APM depth, error tracking and RUM come from separate pieces or third parties, and correlation workflows span components. The usage-based bill is the other caution: it can reproduce New Relic-style cost surprises at scale.

Read full Netdata vs Grafana -> Grafana pricing ->

Vendor 03 / 11 · #signoz

SigNoz

OpenTelemetry-native observability platform on ClickHouse unifying traces, metrics and logs in one application, self-hosted or as a cloud service.

Best for

Teams that want a single open-source application covering the New Relic feature set without assembling separate components
Engineering-led buyers standardizing on OpenTelemetry and ClickHouse SQL
Organizations with DevOps capacity to self-host

Pricing

Open-source, self-hosted community edition (MIT-licensed core): you run and operate it and pay for your own infrastructure
SigNoz Cloud is usage-based, billed per GB of traces and logs ingested and per million metric samples, with retention options
Enterprise edition for BYOC or self-hosted at scale
Bill grows with ingest volume and retention

Pros

One product for traces, metrics, logs, exceptions, dashboards and alerts, built natively on OpenTelemetry
ClickHouse storage gives fast queries over high-volume telemetry and supports PromQL and ClickHouse SQL
Frequently cited by practitioners as the leading open-source New Relic alternative
Self-hosted edition keeps all telemetry on your infrastructure

Cons

Self-hosting means you operate ClickHouse, upgrades, scaling and availability yourself
Younger ecosystem and smaller integration library than New Relic, Datadog or Grafana
Cloud plan is usage-based on ingest, so cost still grows with telemetry volume

Verdict

SigNoz is the closest thing to an open-source New Relic in a single application, and its OpenTelemetry-native design makes the migration conceptually simple: replace New Relic agents with OTel SDKs and a collector pointed at SigNoz, then rebuild NRQL as ClickHouse SQL or the query builder. No historical data moves, so plan a dual-run. Coverage of the core three signals is strong; RUM, synthetics and enterprise APM extras are thinner than New Relic’s. The choice between self-hosted and Cloud is the choice between operational burden and an ingest-based bill.

Read full Netdata vs SigNoz -> SigNoz pricing ->

Vendor 04 / 11 · #datadog

Datadog

The broadest commercial observability and security platform, with 900+ integrations and mature APM, logs, RUM and synthetics.

Best for

Large enterprises that want one vendor for observability, security and digital experience
Teams with complex, heterogeneous estates needing the widest integration library
Buyers with budget who value maturity and support over price

Pricing

Modular per-product pricing: per-host infrastructure billing plus separate SKUs for APM, logs (ingest and indexing), RUM, synthetics and security
Per-seat pricing on some products; usage-based on data volume
Free tier exists with host and usage caps
Bill grows with host count, ingest volume, indexing choices and every product module enabled

Pros

Broadest product surface in the category: APM, logs, RUM, synthetics, security, cloud cost management
900+ integrations and mature language agents
Strong dashboards, alerting and out-of-the-box content
Frequently the first alternative enterprises evaluate against New Relic

Cons

Modular usage-based pricing is widely reported as the most expensive option in the category; cost is a leading reason teams evaluate Datadog alternatives too
Proprietary query language and agents increase lock-in versus OpenTelemetry-native alternatives
Full-stack coverage (APM + logs + RUM together) scales steeply with volume

Verdict

Datadog is the complete feature-for-feature New Relic replacement, with deeper APM and profiling on top. Migration is operationally straightforward - dual-run agents, swap New Relic language agents for Datadog’s or OTel ingestion - but dashboards, monitors and SLOs are rebuilt in Datadog’s own query syntax, which trades one proprietary model for another. The problem is motivation: if you are leaving New Relic over cost, Datadog usually costs more. Rank it first on capability, fourth on this list because capability is not why most buyers are reading it.

Read full Netdata vs Datadog -> Datadog pricing ->

Vendor 05 / 11 · #dynatrace

Dynatrace

Enterprise observability platform with agent auto-instrumentation, topology-aware dependency mapping and the Davis AI engine for root-cause analysis.

Best for

Large enterprises wanting automated root-cause analysis and dependency mapping with minimal manual configuration
Organizations with strict enterprise requirements: compliance, support, on-prem options
Teams replacing New Relic at the high end of the APM market

Pricing

Dynatrace Platform Subscription: a minimum annual spend commitment consumed against a rate card based on actual usage
Usage dimensions include host-hours, data ingest and monitoring units; unlimited seats with no per-user fees
15-day free trial; no permanent free tier for production use
Bill grows with monitored infrastructure size and ingest volume against the annual commit

Pros

Davis AI performs causal, topology-aware root-cause analysis across the full stack
OneAgent auto-discovers and auto-instruments applications and infrastructure with minimal setup
Unlimited seats - no per-user pricing, removing one of New Relic’s most resented cost lines
Deep APM maturity including code-level visibility and profiling

Cons

Annual-commitment consumption model requires forecasting; underestimating means overage or over-commitment
Premium enterprise pricing; generally the most expensive class of alternative
Proprietary agent and query model; less OpenTelemetry-native than newer alternatives

Verdict

Dynatrace is the pick when the reason for leaving New Relic is capability, not cost: deeper enterprise APM, genuinely automatic instrumentation via OneAgent, and causal AI root-cause analysis that works out of the box. Unlimited seats directly answers New Relic’s per-user pricing. Migration is more consultative than with OTel-native tools - OneAgent replaces New Relic agents wholesale, and dashboards and NRQL are rebuilt in Dynatrace’s model. Small and mid-size teams will find it overkill and over-budget; enterprises leaving New Relic for depth will find it the strongest option here.

Read full Netdata vs Dynatrace -> Dynatrace pricing ->

Vendor 06 / 11 · #clickstack

ClickStack (ClickHouse)

ClickHouse’s open-source observability stack (OpenTelemetry Collector, ClickHouse, HyperDX UI) unifying logs, traces, metrics and sessions with SQL-based analysis.

Best for

Engineering teams that want New Relic-style full-stack observability with SQL analysis and no per-seat tax
Teams hitting cardinality or cost walls in Prometheus-based stacks
Buyers comfortable operating ClickHouse-backed infrastructure

Pricing

Open source, self-hosted: you run and operate the stack and pay for your own infrastructure
ClickHouse Cloud offers a managed, usage-based option billed on compute and storage consumed
No per-seat charges; unlimited users on the self-hosted model
Bill grows with data volume and compute in the cloud option, or with your own hardware self-hosted

Pros

OpenTelemetry-native by design; HyperDX provides log, trace, metric and session search in one interface
ClickHouse storage delivers high compression and fast queries over large telemetry volumes
SQL as the universal query language keeps skills transferable and avoids proprietary query lock-in
Positioned explicitly as a New Relic alternative focused on breaking the ingest-pricing model

Cons

Younger product: less feature completeness, fewer integrations and a smaller ecosystem than New Relic or Datadog
Self-hosting requires operating ClickHouse and the collector pipeline
No New Relic-style APM language agents; instrumentation is OpenTelemetry-based

Verdict

ClickStack is the strongest cost-and-control play on this list for teams with the engineering capacity to run it. Migration is clean in one direction: point OTel SDKs and collectors at the OTLP endpoint and NRQL becomes SQL against ClickHouse, a language your team likely already knows. What you trade is maturity - enterprise extras like RUM depth, synthetics breadth and compliance packaging are thin, and historical New Relic data does not migrate. For cost-motivated exits that refuse another usage-metered SaaS, it deserves a serious evaluation.

Visit ClickStack -> ClickHouse pricing ->

Vendor 07 / 11 · #honeycomb

Honeycomb

Observability platform built for high-cardinality, wide event debugging of production systems, OpenTelemetry-native by design.

Best for

Engineering teams that debug production with high-cardinality, ad-hoc queries rather than fixed dashboards
OpenTelemetry-first organizations wanting a vendor that champions the standard
Teams that found New Relic’s APM too coarse for microservice debugging

Pricing

Usage-based: billed on event volume with plan tiers, plus per-seat user pricing on paid plans
Free tier with monthly event-volume and metric-datapoint caps
Enterprise plans add private cloud and support options
Bill grows with event volume; sampling in your collector is the main cost lever

Pros

Best-in-class high-cardinality interactive querying (BubbleUp, wide events)
OpenTelemetry-native with strong tooling: Refinery sampling proxy, OpenTelemetry distributions
Free tier usable for real projects; transparent usage-based model
Strong developer experience and credibility among SREs

Cons

Not an all-in-one New Relic replacement: infrastructure monitoring, synthetics breadth and enterprise IT features are thinner
Event-volume pricing still grows with telemetry; teams must manage sampling deliberately
Per-seat user pricing on paid plans, one of the cost lines buyers leave New Relic to escape

Verdict

Honeycomb is the best tool on this list for the debugging slice of what New Relic does: ask arbitrary questions of high-cardinality trace data and get answers interactively. Moving from New Relic means replacing language agents with OTel SDKs pointed at Honeycomb’s OTLP endpoint - and accepting that NRQL dashboards have no equivalent, because Honeycomb’s model is ad-hoc query, not stored boards. Infrastructure monitoring stays with another tool, so this is usually a two-vendor post-New Relic stack. If coarse APM aggregates were your frustration, that trade is worth it.

Read full Netdata vs Honeycomb -> Honeycomb pricing ->

Vendor 08 / 11 · #elk

Elastic Observability

Elasticsearch-based observability suite covering logs, metrics, traces and APM, deployable self-managed or as Elastic Cloud.

Best for

Teams already running Elasticsearch that want observability on existing infrastructure
Buyers needing powerful full-text log search and long retention under their own control
Organizations with data-sovereignty requirements that want self-hosted full-stack observability

Pricing

Elastic Cloud: usage-based, pay-as-you-go or prepaid on resources consumed
Self-managed: licence-based on nodes and RAM used
Basic free tier of the self-managed distribution exists with limited features
Bill grows with data volume, retention and cluster size

Pros

Best-in-class full-text log search and analytics on the Elasticsearch engine
Full deployment flexibility: on-prem, private cloud, or Elastic Cloud across all major clouds
OpenTelemetry support via EDOT collectors and SDKs
Mature APM, uptime and SIEM capabilities on one data store

Cons

Operating a self-managed Elastic cluster is a significant engineering commitment: sizing, shards, upgrades
Cloud costs grow steeply with ingest and retention
Search-centric UI and workflow; out-of-the-box AI root-cause analysis and auto-dashboards are less turnkey than New Relic

Verdict

Elastic is the strongest self-hosted, log-centric answer to New Relic, and the only one where full-text search over long retention is the headline feature. Migration replaces New Relic agents with Elastic Agents or EDOT collectors, and NRQL becomes KQL, Lucene or EQL with dashboards rebuilt in Kibana. It is a heavier lift than New Relic for turnkey APM, and the operational burden of a self-managed cluster is real - budget engineering time, not just nodes. When logs are the dominant signal and data must stay in-house, it is the right call; otherwise it is more platform than most teams need.

Read full Netdata vs Elastic -> Elastic pricing ->

Vendor 09 / 11 · #sentry

Sentry

Developer-first error tracking and application monitoring with tracing, profiling and session replay, self-hosted or SaaS.

Best for

Product engineering teams whose primary pain is application errors and release quality
Teams wanting tracing and profiling with a lightweight, developer-loved workflow
Organizations wanting an error-tracking layer alongside a separate infrastructure tool

Pricing

Usage-based: billed on events (errors, spans, replays) with plan tiers; per-seat pricing on team plans
Free developer tier with event-volume caps; paid tiers add quota management and features
Self-hosted open-source edition available; you run and operate it
Bill grows with event volume; quota controls and sampling are the levers

Pros

Category leader in error tracking with deep stack traces, release tracking and issue workflow
Adds tracing, profiling and session replay; strong language and SDK coverage
Self-hosted option and generous free developer tier
Frequently adopted as the application-layer complement when teams leave all-in-one APM vendors

Cons

Not an infrastructure monitor: host, network, database and Kubernetes monitoring are out of scope
Event-volume pricing still grows with usage; high-throughput apps need sampling discipline
Log management is not a core capability

Verdict

Sentry replaces the slice of New Relic that product engineers touch daily - errors, releases, traces, profiling - and does it with a workflow developers genuinely prefer. Per-language SDKs replace New Relic APM agents; NRQL dashboards have no equivalent because Sentry is issue- and event-centric. The catch is structural: hosts, networks, databases and Kubernetes are out of scope, so leaving New Relic for Sentry alone leaves half your estate blind. The common pattern is Sentry plus an infrastructure tool (Netdata, Grafana, Prometheus) as a deliberate two-vendor stack - two consoles instead of one, and a workflow teams tend to prefer.

Read full Netdata vs Sentry -> Sentry pricing ->

Vendor 10 / 11 · #coroot

Coroot

eBPF-based observability platform that auto-discovers services, dependencies and metrics with zero code instrumentation, self-hosted or cloud.

Best for

Kubernetes-heavy teams that want service maps, dependencies and RED metrics without instrumenting code
Buyers who want New Relic-style automatic discovery but self-hosted
Teams frustrated with agent sprawl and manual instrumentation

Pricing

Open-source community edition, self-hosted: you run and operate it
Cloud/enterprise edition priced per monitored CPU core, a predictable infrastructure-based unit rather than data volume
14-day trial of the paid edition
Bill grows with the compute size of monitored infrastructure, not with ingest volume

Pros

Zero-instrumentation: eBPF captures service dependencies, latency and metrics without code changes or language agents
Automatic service maps and per-service RED metrics out of the box
Predictable per-CPU-core pricing instead of ingest-based billing
Open-source edition for full control

Cons

Requires Linux kernel eBPF support; not suitable for Windows-heavy or restricted managed estates
Smaller company and ecosystem; fewer integrations and less enterprise packaging than New Relic
APM depth (code-level traces, profiling) is lighter than New Relic or Datadog

Verdict

Coroot is the most interesting architectural answer to New Relic on this list: deploy one eBPF agent and service maps, dependencies and RED metrics appear without touching application code. Migration is the lightest here - no SDK swaps, just node-level agents, with optional OpenTelemetry tracing for depth. The per-CPU-core bill scales with infrastructure size, not telemetry volume, which is the predictability cost-driven leavers want. The limits are real: Linux-only estates, no RUM or synthetics, lighter code-level APM, and a smaller vendor behind it. On Kubernetes, it punches well above its rank.

Read full Netdata vs Coroot -> Coroot pricing ->

Vendor 11 / 11 · #betterstack

Better Stack

Observability and incident-management suite combining log management, metrics, uptime monitoring and on-call in one product with transparent pricing.

Best for

Teams that want logs, uptime and incident management in one place with straightforward pricing
Small-to-mid teams that found New Relic’s product maze and pricing complex
Organizations wanting on-call and status pages bundled with observability

Pricing

Usage-based: per-GB log retention pricing plus per-host and per-monitor dimensions for uptime monitoring
Free tier exists with usage caps
Add-on products (incident management, status pages, error tracking) priced separately
Bill grows with log volume, retention and monitored resources

Pros

Logs, metrics, uptime monitoring, on-call and status pages in one integrated product
Transparent, published per-GB and per-host pricing - a direct answer to opaque renewal experiences
OpenTelemetry and Prometheus ingestion for metrics; SQL-based metric querying
Strong incident-management workflow (Slack/Teams-native) that New Relic lacks natively

Cons

APM and distributed tracing are less mature than New Relic, Datadog or Dynatrace
Log-centric heritage: infrastructure metrics depth and auto-discovery are lighter
Per-GB retention pricing still scales with log volume

Verdict

Better Stack is the direct answer to the complexity complaint: one clean product, published pricing, and incident management bundled where New Relic makes you buy elsewhere. Migration ships logs via its collectors and metrics via Prometheus or OTel; error tracking is Sentry-compatible, but New Relic APM agents have no real equivalent here, so deep tracing teams should look higher up the list. It is the right size for small-to-mid teams whose New Relic usage was mostly logs, uptime and alerting, and the wrong tool for buyers who relied on APM depth.

Read full Netdata vs Better Stack -> Better Stack pricing ->

Frequently asked questions

What is the best New Relic alternative?

Netdata is the best New Relic alternative for most teams, but the right choice depends on why you are leaving. Cost predictability and per-second data favor Netdata, whose per-node pricing does not grow with ingest volume or users - the main driver when infrastructure plus APM monitoring is what inflates the New Relic bill. Open-source control favors SigNoz or ClickStack, enterprise APM depth favors Datadog or Dynatrace, log-centric self-hosting favors Elastic, and error tracking favors Sentry.

Is there an open-source New Relic alternative?

Yes: SigNoz, ClickStack, Coroot, the Grafana stack (Prometheus, Loki, Tempo), Elastic (open-core) and Netdata’s agent are all open source. SigNoz and ClickStack are the closest single-application equivalents to the New Relic feature set. Remember that open source is a distribution model, not a price: self-hosted means you run and operate it, and infrastructure plus engineering time are real costs.

Why is New Relic so expensive?

New Relic bills on data ingest plus users (or compute plus ingest), so the bill grows with telemetry volume and engineering headcount at the same time. High-volume signals - logs, traces, high-cardinality metrics - are the main cost drivers. Alternatives meter different units: per-node (Netdata), per-CPU-core (Coroot), usage-based (Grafana, Honeycomb, SigNoz Cloud), or an annual commit (Dynatrace), and the right one depends on which of your dimensions grows fastest.

How do I migrate from New Relic without losing visibility?

Standardize on OpenTelemetry first: most modern alternatives ingest OTLP natively, so repointing collectors replaces New Relic agents without re-instrumenting applications. Run both platforms in parallel during a dual-run period, because historical New Relic data does not migrate. Then rebuild dashboards, alerts and NRQL queries in the target tool’s query language - SQL, PromQL, KQL or a proprietary equivalent.

Does Netdata support distributed tracing like New Relic?

Yes. Netdata ingests OpenTelemetry traces over OTLP (gRPC and HTTP) on the same agent that collects your metrics and logs. Spans are stored and indexed on your own infrastructure, and the Traces tab in Netdata Cloud provides a duration heatmap, filters by service, operation, status, duration and any span attribute, RED analysis computed from the matching spans, a full waterfall for every trace, and every span attribute your instrumentation recorded. Native Jaeger or Zipkin protocols are not ingested, so send spans through OpenTelemetry.

What is the cheapest New Relic alternative for small teams?

Netdata’s per-node pricing starts at $4.5/node/month on annual plans and does not bill for metrics volume, users or retention; the Community plan is free for personal, non-commercial use with up to 5 active connected nodes, and full details are on the Netdata pricing page. Self-hosted open-source options (SigNoz, ClickStack, Coroot, the Grafana stack) carry no licence fee but real operating costs. Beware usage-based free tiers: they cap ingest and retention, and costs appear as volume grows.

Can I self-host a New Relic alternative?

Is Grafana a full New Relic replacement?

What tools are similar to New Relic?

11 New Relic alternatives that fix the reason you are leaving

How we evaluated New Relic alternatives

Netdata

Grafana Cloud

SigNoz

Datadog

Dynatrace

ClickStack (ClickHouse)

Honeycomb

Elastic Observability

Sentry

Coroot

Better Stack

Frequently asked questions

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