Caddy vs New Relic
A source-aware comparison of pricing, documented capabilities and workflow fit.
Short answer
- Price: not directly comparable — Caddy is free, New Relic is free tier available.
- How to start: Caddy is free, New Relic is free tier available.
- Where they differ: only Caddy has open source / self-hostable and only New Relic has mobile app and sso (saml); both offer public api.
These lines are generated from the pricing we track, not from a paid placement. How we score tools.
What Caddy is
What Caddy isCaddy is a web server that obtains and renews TLS certificates automatically, with a configuration file most people can read. Automatic HTTPS is not a module to enable but the default behaviour: point a domain at it and a valid certificate is issued and renewed without a cron job or a separate client. A Caddyfile for a reverse proxy with TLS is a few lines where the equivalent elsewhere runs to dozens, which is why it is a common choice for small deployments and internal services.
What New Relic is
What New Relic isNew Relic is a full observability platform covering application performance, infrastructure, logs and browser monitoring. The pricing model charges per user and per gigabyte of data ingested. Having traces, logs and metrics in one query language is the argument for it: an alert can be followed from a slow endpoint down to the individual database call without switching products. The cost model rewards discipline about what you send, since ingest volume rather than host count drives the bill.
Who it is for: engineering teams that want application traces, infrastructure metrics, logs and browser monitoring in one place and are willing to pay by data volume and by user rather than by host. The free tier includes a generous monthly ingest allowance and one full-platform user, which is enough for a side project or a small service to run real observability at no cost.
Where it falls short: the user-based pricing means every engineer who needs full access is a paid seat, and data ingest charges grow with traffic, so a busy production system needs sampling and retention rules to keep the bill sane. The interface is broad and can be hard to navigate compared with Datadog's more opinionated dashboards. Grafana with Prometheus and Loki is cheaper for teams that will operate it themselves. New Relic is strongest when one vendor for everything, with a real free tier, is worth more than best-of-breed in each category.
Side by side
| Caddy | New Relic | |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Developer Tools | Developer Tools |
| How to start | Freeverified | Free tiernot a monthly price |
| Public API | Yes | Yes |
| Mobile app | No | Yes |
| Open source / self-hostable | Yes | No |
| SSO (SAML) | No | Yes |
| Visit | Caddy ↗ | New Relic ↗ |
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What Caddy is built to do
- Automatic HTTPS
- Certificates are issued and renewed by default, with no separate ACME client.
- Readable configuration
- A Caddyfile for TLS and reverse proxy fits in a few lines.
- Single binary
- Ships as one static binary with no runtime dependencies to install.
- Admin API
- Configuration can be changed at runtime over an HTTP API without a restart.
What New Relic is built to do
- Distributed tracing
- Follow one request across services to find where latency is actually spent.
- Unified query language
- Metrics, logs, traces and events queried together instead of in separate tools.
- Real user monitoring
- Browser and mobile timings from actual visitors, not synthetic checks.
- Ingest-based pricing
- Cost follows data volume and seats rather than the number of hosts.
Choose Caddy if
- Teams that want automatic HTTPS from a free, open source web server
- Self-hosters who prefer a single binary over a package plus certificate tooling
- Businesses that want paid private support, offered through sponsorship tiers
Skip Caddy if
- You require a contractual support SLA at a published price — sponsorship tiers are not priced on the site
- Your organisation forbids depending on sponsorship-funded projects
- You need a named commercial licence; the licence is not stated on the homepage
Choose New Relic if
- Small teams that fit the free allowance — 100 GB of data ingest per month, unlimited basic users and one full-platform user
- Consolidating monitoring into one platform rather than buying several
- Usage that is steady enough to predict data volume
Skip New Relic if
- Your data volume is spiky — past the free 100 GB you pay $0.40/GB ($0.60/GB on Data Plus), and the bill follows ingest
- Many people need full-platform access: after the first user, Standard is $99/user/mo and Pro $349/user/mo on annual commitment
- You want a simple interface; it is dense and takes learning
Evidence and freshness
Where a claim on this page comes from a vendor page, it is linked here.
Caddy: pros & cons
- HTTPS configured correctly by default
- Configuration is short and legible
- Single binary, easy to deploy
- Smaller community than nginx
- Fewer third-party guides
- Some advanced setups need plugins
New Relic: pros & cons
- Broad coverage in one product
- Generous free data allowance
- Strong application tracing
- Data-volume pricing can escalate without warning
- Interface is dense and takes learning
- Per-user pricing discourages wide access
Our verdict on Caddy
The easiest path to good TLS defaults. nginx still wins on ecosystem and examples.
Our verdict on New Relic
Capable and complete. Watch the ingest bill: teams are far more often surprised by cost here than by capability.
Published plans, side by side
Every figure below was read from the vendor's own pricing page and is shown with the sentence it came from. Where a vendor publishes no plan prices, we say so rather than guess.
Caddy
No published plan prices verified. Caddy either quotes on request or renders its prices in a way we could not read from the pricing page.
New Relic
- Standard$10/user/mo
Standard $10 first user then $99/additional user, max 5
- Pro$349/user/mo billed annually
Pro $349/user annual or $418.80 monthly pay-as-you-go
Caddy vs New Relic: common questions
- Does Caddy or New Relic have a free plan?
- Both do: Caddy is free, and New Relic has a free tier with limits.
- What is the difference between Caddy and New Relic?
- On the criteria we check, only Caddy has open source / self-hostable and only New Relic has mobile app and sso (saml); both offer public api. The table above lists every criterion side by side.