New Relic vs Prometheus
A source-aware comparison of pricing, documented capabilities and workflow fit.
Short answer
- Price: not directly comparable — New Relic is free tier available, Prometheus is free.
- How to start: New Relic is free tier available, Prometheus is free.
- Where they differ: only New Relic has mobile app and sso (saml) and only Prometheus has open source / self-hostable; both offer public api.
These lines are generated from the pricing we track, not from a paid placement. How we score tools.
What New Relic is
New 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.
What Prometheus is
Prometheus scrapes metrics from your services and stores them as time series, with its own query language for alerting and dashboards.
Side by side
| New Relic | Prometheus | |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Developer Tools | Developer Tools |
| How to start | Free tiernot a monthly price | Freeverified |
| Public API | Yes | Yes |
| Mobile app | Yes | No |
| Open source / self-hostable | No | Yes |
| SSO (SAML) | Yes | No |
| Visit | New Relic ↗ | Prometheus ↗ |
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 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
Choose Prometheus if
- Teams running services that need metrics and alerting they control.
Evidence and freshness
Where a claim on this page comes from a vendor page, it is linked here.
Prometheus
Open source, free — vendor page verified · reviewed 2026-09-03
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
Prometheus: pros & cons
- The de facto standard for metrics in Kubernetes
- Pull model means no agent pushing to you
- Free and open source
- Long-term storage needs an extra component
- PromQL takes time to learn
- Not built for logs or traces
Our verdict on New Relic
Capable and complete. Watch the ingest bill: teams are far more often surprised by cost here than by capability.
Our verdict on Prometheus
Pair it with Grafana and you have a complete metrics stack. Plan for long-term storage before you need it.