Best New Relic alternatives in 2026
These are the 5 closest tools to New Relic that we track, ordered by what they cost to start. Each entry says how its pricing differs from New Relic's — based on the numbers we hold, not on who pays us. We do not publish a quality score, because we do not have one we can stand behind.
Of the 5 alternatives on this page, 3 publish a price we could verify. The cheapest paid step among them is Datadog at $15/user/mo billed annually, while New Relic starts paid at $10/user/mo. 2 of them publish a free plan (Better Stack, Bugsnag).
Why people leave New Relic
- Data-volume pricing can escalate without warning
- Interface is dense and takes learning
- Per-user pricing discourages wide access
These are the drawbacks listed in our own New Relic review — not complaints we invented for this page.
- Prometheus
Open-source metrics collection and alerting.
vs New Relic: priced differently (Free vs Free tier).
Why switch to Prometheus
- The de facto standard for metrics in Kubernetes
- Pull model means no agent pushing to you
What you give up
- Long-term storage needs an extra component
Best for: Teams running services that need metrics and alerting they control.
- Better Stack
Uptime monitoring, logs and incident management.
vs New Relic: pricier to start ($34/user/mo billed annually vs $10/user/mo).
First paid step: Responder license at $34/user/mo billed annually
Why switch to Better Stack
- Monitoring, logs and on-call together
- Clean interface and quick setup
What you give up
- Log retention costs rise with volume
Best for: Small teams that want monitoring and on-call without assembling three vendors.
- Bugsnag
Error monitoring and application stability scores.
vs New Relic: priced differently (Free tier vs Free tier).
Why switch to Bugsnag
- Stability scores tie errors to releases
- Good mobile SDK coverage
What you give up
- Event pricing climbs with traffic
Best for: Teams that ship mobile or web releases and need to know if quality is slipping.
- Datadog
Full-stack monitoring.
vs New Relic: pricier to start ($15/user/mo billed annually vs $10/user/mo).
First paid step: Infrastructure Pro at $15/user/mo billed annually
Why switch to Datadog
- Single Source of Truth: Monitor your entire stack in one unified dashboard.
- Deep Visibility: Trace every request across different services for fast debugging.
What you give up
- High Cost: Pricing can become very expensive as you scale and add more modules.
Best for: DevOps Engineers and Enterprise IT Teams.
- Grafana
Dashboards and visualisation for metrics and logs.
vs New Relic: priced differently (Free tier vs Free tier).
First paid step: Pro at $19/mo
Why switch to Grafana
- Connects to dozens of data sources out of the box
- Open source and self-hostable
What you give up
- Dashboard design takes real effort to get right
Best for: Any team that needs to see what its systems are doing, from one server to a large fleet.
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