New Relic
Application performance monitoring and observability platform with a notably generous free tier.
New Relic Referral Code & Link
No referral code or link is currently available for New Relic.
Quick Summary
New Relic provides application performance monitoring (APM), infrastructure monitoring, and log management in one platform, one of the longer-established observability tools used by engineering teams to track application health, diagnose performance issues, and investigate outages. Its 100GB-per-month free data ingestion tier is notably more generous than most competitors in the observability category, making it genuinely accessible for smaller teams and applications to adopt structured monitoring before committing to significant spend.
New Relic at a Glance
| Category | Observability Tools |
|---|---|
| Pricing model | Freemium |
| Starting price | $0 /month (free plan available) |
| Platforms | Web |
| Editorial rating | ★ 4.1 / 5 |
| Best for | Application performance monitoring and observability platform with a notably generous free tier. |
| Community votes | 15 |
Pros
- Generous free tier (100GB/month) makes it accessible for smaller teams and applications to start with real observability tooling at no cost
- Combines APM, infrastructure monitoring, and log management in one connected platform rather than requiring separate disconnected tools
- Established, mature product with a long track record handling production observability at real scale
- Distributed tracing helps diagnose performance issues across microservice architectures where a problem in one service affects others downstream
- Customizable dashboards let engineering teams build views tailored to their specific application architecture and key metrics
Cons
- Usage-based pricing beyond the free tier can become expensive and harder to predict at scale, particularly as application data volume grows
- Interface can feel dense and overwhelming for teams new to observability tooling, given the platform's broad feature surface area
- Cost predictability requires active monitoring of data ingestion volume to avoid unexpected bill increases as usage grows
- Some advanced features and integrations require deeper platform familiarity to configure effectively
New Relic Pricing Plans
Official pricing as published by New Relic. Verify current rates before purchasing.
New Relic was among the earlier entrants establishing application performance monitoring as a distinct, essential category of engineering tooling, and it remains a mature, full-featured observability platform with a free tier that's genuinely competitive for teams just starting to invest in structured monitoring.
A Generous Entry Point
New Relic's 100GB-per-month free data allowance stands out in a category where most competitors gate meaningful functionality behind paid tiers almost immediately. For a smaller application or a team evaluating observability tooling for the first time, this free tier provides real, usable monitoring capability rather than a token trial — a genuine practical advantage for teams without budget yet allocated to observability spend.
Unified Observability Platform
Rather than requiring separate tools for application performance monitoring, infrastructure monitoring, and log management, New Relic combines all three in one connected platform, letting engineers correlate a performance anomaly with relevant infrastructure metrics and log entries without switching between disconnected systems — a meaningful workflow advantage when diagnosing the root cause of a production issue under time pressure.
Distributed Tracing for Complex Architectures
For teams running microservice architectures, where a single user request might touch many separate services, New Relic's distributed tracing follows that request's full journey across service boundaries, helping pinpoint exactly where latency or errors are actually originating rather than just observing symptoms in whichever service happens to be monitored most closely.
The Cost Predictability Challenge
New Relic's usage-based pricing beyond the free tier, while flexible, requires active attention to avoid unpredictable cost growth as an application's data volume increases — a team that doesn't actively monitor their ingestion volume can see costs scale up meaningfully without much warning. This is a common characteristic of usage-based observability pricing generally, not unique to New Relic, but worth planning for explicitly.
Pricing
| Plan | Price | What's included |
|---|---|---|
| Free | $0/month | 100GB free data per month |
| Standard | Usage-based | More data, advanced alerting |
Who Should Use New Relic
Smaller teams and applications just adopting structured observability get genuine value from New Relic's unusually generous free tier. Teams running microservice architectures benefit from distributed tracing capability for diagnosing cross-service issues. Larger organizations with significant, well-established data volume should plan carefully around usage-based pricing to keep costs predictable as the application scales.
Verdict
New Relic's combination of a genuinely generous free tier and a mature, unified observability platform makes it an accessible and capable entry point into structured application monitoring, particularly for teams not yet ready to commit significant budget. As usage scales, active cost management becomes important, but the platform's depth and reliability remain solid throughout that growth.
New Relic One Platform
New Relic's unified platform combines APM, infrastructure monitoring, log management, browser monitoring, and synthetics in one product — enabling correlating application performance issues with infrastructure metrics and logs without switching between tools.
New Relic vs. Datadog vs. Dynatrace
Dynatrace is the AI-powered observability platform with automatic instrumentation. Datadog has the best visualization and integration ecosystem. New Relic has the most generous free tier (100GB/month) and per-user pricing rather than per-host — making it cost-effective for organizations with large infrastructure but small teams.
Overall rating: 4.1 / 5
Best Alternatives to New Relic
2 alternatives listed. Looking for a New Relic alternative? Here are the top options our community recommends, ranked by popularity and editorial score.
Quick comparison: New Relic vs Datadog
| Feature | New Relic | Datadog |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | Freemium | Paid |
| Platforms | Web | Web |
| Editorial rating | ★ 4.1 / 5 | ★ 4 / 5 |
| Community votes | 15 | 356 |
Full-stack observability platform spanning infrastructure, APM, logs, and security monitoring.
Open-source dashboarding and visualization tool for metrics, logs, and traces from any data source.
Frequently Asked Questions
Common questions about New Relic, answered by our editorial team.
- Is New Relic free?
- New Relic offers 100GB of free data ingestion per month, which is genuinely enough for smaller applications to get real value from full observability tooling; usage beyond that threshold is billed based on data volume.
- What is New Relic used for?
- New Relic is used for application performance monitoring, infrastructure monitoring, and log management, helping engineering teams diagnose performance issues, investigate outages, and understand application health across complex, often distributed systems.
- How does New Relic compare to Datadog?
- Both cover similar core ground (APM, infrastructure, logs), with New Relic's free tier being notably more generous for smaller teams getting started, while Datadog is often cited for its broader third-party integration ecosystem and is generally considered to have a steeper but ultimately more extensive feature set at scale.
- Is New Relic good for microservices?
- Yes, distributed tracing capability helps teams diagnose performance issues that span multiple services in a microservice architecture, tracking a single request's journey across service boundaries to pinpoint where latency or errors actually originate.
- Is New Relic hard to learn?
- It can feel dense for teams new to observability tooling generally, given the breadth of available features (APM, infrastructure, logs, dashboards, alerting) — investing time in initial configuration and dashboard setup pays off but does require a real learning investment.
- How is New Relic priced beyond the free tier?
- Pricing beyond the 100GB free monthly data allowance is usage-based, scaling with data ingestion volume, which requires active monitoring to keep costs predictable as an application's traffic and logging volume grow over time.
- Does New Relic include log management?
- Yes, log management is included alongside APM and infrastructure monitoring in the same platform, letting engineering teams correlate logs with performance metrics and traces without needing a separate, disconnected logging tool.
- What is a referral bonus on Kreemhunt?
- A referral bonus is an incentive — like bonus credit, a discount, or extra features — that a software vendor offers when someone signs up through a referral link or code instead of going to the product directly. Kreemhunt tracks which of the tools we cover currently have an active referral arrangement, like New Relic, so you don't have to hunt for one yourself.
- Does New Relic currently have a referral code or link?
- Not at the moment. Kreemhunt doesn't have a tracked referral code or link for New Relic right now — this page will update automatically if one becomes available, so it's worth checking back before you sign up.
- Does using a referral link cost me anything extra?
- No. Using a referral link or code to sign up for New Relic costs the same as signing up directly — in most cases referral programs are designed so the new user gets a bonus and the referrer gets a reward, with no markup passed on to you.
- How do I claim New Relic's referral bonus?
- There's no active referral bonus for New Relic tracked on Kreemhunt right now. Once one becomes available, it'll appear in the referral box on this page along with instructions for claiming it.
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