Best New Relic Alternatives in 2026

If you have a New Relic invoice open in another tab, the question is rarely "which tool has the best dashboards." It is "what will this cost once my hosts, telemetry and users grow?" Eight observability platforms are worth evaluating as New Relic alternatives, and they do not bill the same way. Datadog, Splunk and Dynatrace charge by host or by memory. Honeycomb charges by event volume. SigNoz and Elastic charge by gigabyte ingested, and Elastic bills retention separately. Sentry is built around application errors and removes per-seat cost. Grafana Cloud sits between them with a free tier and usage-based Pro. Which is cheapest depends on your workload shape, so this page sorts the options by the unit each one bills on.

This page is for engineering leads, SREs and platform teams already running New Relic. If you are happy with your current bill and only want a feature checklist, it will be less useful. No vendor publishes a total for an unknown workload, so nothing here is an estimated bill. Every price is the vendor's own published list rate, read on 2026-11-01.

The short answer

• Datadog: best for teams that want infrastructure, APM and logs from one vendor and accept per-host billing. Infrastructure Pro is $15 per host per month, billed annually.

• Dynatrace: best for teams that can forecast memory use and want hourly metering. Full-Stack Monitoring is $0.01 per memory-GiB-hour.

• Grafana Cloud: best for teams already on Grafana or Prometheus. It has an always-free tier and Pro from $19 per month plus usage.

• Honeycomb: best for teams that want unlimited seats and can plan around event volume. Pro starts at $150 for a 50M-event allowance.

• Splunk Observability Cloud: best for teams that want host-based tiers with a visible feature ladder, from $15 per host per month.

• Elastic Observability: best for teams with large log volumes that accept separate ingest and retention line items.

• Sentry: best for teams whose main pain is application errors, tracing and mobile crashes. Team is $26 per month billed annually with unlimited users.

• SigNoz: best for teams that want usage-only pricing or a self-hosted edition.

Quash is covered after these as an adjacent option. It is a pre-production testing product, not a replacement for New Relic's observability job. If your real problem is shipping pipelines rather than production monitoring, our CI/CD tools guide is a better starting point.

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Compare New Relic alternatives at a glance

List rates, not estimated bills. All figures were read from vendor pages on 2026-11-01.

Quash is not in this table because it does not bill or compete on observability axes.

Why teams look at New Relic alternatives: questions to ask

You may have your own reasons for leaving, and no churn data here says which are most common. New Relic's own pricing page does show the terms that tend to prompt a closer look at the bill.

• Does your team fit under the seat limit? Standard is limited to five full platform users. Pro advertises unlimited full platform users.

• How much of your telemetry fits the free allowance? The perpetual free tier includes 100 GB per month of ingest, one free full platform user and unlimited basic users, with no credit card.

• Are you paying for seats, data, or both? Pro also lists "Optional: Full consumption pricing with no user licenses." So "New Relic charges per user" is true of the lower tiers only. Check which tier you are on before you treat seats as the problem.

Answer those three first. They tell you which of the alternatives below actually changes your situation.

Why the billing unit matters more than the headline price

Two products with similar headline numbers can produce very different bills, because they meter different things. Five billing shapes recur in the rate cards.

Per host. Datadog Infrastructure Pro is $15 per infra host per month and APM is $31 per APM host per month, both billed annually. Splunk's Infrastructure tier starts at $15 per host per month. If you run many small hosts with little telemetry each, this rate dominates.

Per memory-GiB-hour. Dynatrace Full-Stack Monitoring is $0.01 per memory-GiB-hour. A host with more memory costs more, and the meter runs hourly. You cannot compare it with a flat per-host rate until you know your memory footprint.

Per event. Honeycomb Pro starts at $150 for 50M events and 250M time-series data points. The plan's ceilings are 750M events and 3.75B data points, reached at higher spend.

Per GB ingested, plus retention. SigNoz bills traces and logs at $0.30/GB. Elastic Serverless Complete ingest is "as low as" $0.09/GB, with retention billed separately at $0.019 per GB-month.

Per seat. New Relic Standard caps full platform users at five, while Honeycomb and Sentry's Team and Business plans offer unlimited seats.

The rankings invert with workload. Many hosts and little telemetry means per-host rates, where Datadog, Splunk and Dynatrace drive the bill. Few hosts and heavy telemetry means ingest and retention, where SigNoz and Elastic drive it. Do not compare a $15 host rate, a $19 platform minimum and a $150 event allowance as if they were the same kind of price.

Datadog

What it is. Datadog is a hosted observability platform covering infrastructure, application performance monitoring (APM), logs and custom metrics.

Who it suits. Teams that want one vendor for infrastructure and APM and are comfortable with per-host billing.

Pricing. The US Datadog pricing list prices APM at $31 per APM host per month billed annually, and $36 month-to-month or on demand. Infrastructure Pro is $15 per infra host per month annually and $18 month-to-month. Logs ingestion and APM ingestion are each $0.10 per GB. Container monitoring is $1 per container per month. The page publishes no complete-platform total.

What you give up. Costs scale with host count and with every add-on meter. Adding APM to a large fleet makes the APM host line grow alongside the infrastructure line.

Dynatrace

What it is. Dynatrace is an observability platform that meters usage through a platform subscription built on rate-card items.

Who it suits. Teams that can estimate their memory footprint and want metering by memory and hour.

Pricing. The Dynatrace rate card lists Full-Stack Monitoring at $0.01 per memory-GiB-hour, Infrastructure Monitoring at $0.04 per hour for any size host, and Foundation & Discovery at $0.01 per hour for any size host. Traces cost $0.20 per GiB to ingest and process, $0.0007 per GiB-day to retain and $0.0035 per GiB scanned to query.

Trace billing is not uniformly an overage. Dynatrace's OpenTelemetry licensing documentation says Full-Stack Monitoring "includes a defined amount of trace data volume for traces that are sent via the OneAgent Trace API or from a Full-Stack monitored host," and only trace data from those sources above that volume is charged. Other sources are metered, and query and retention are metered separately.

What you give up. Hourly, memory-based metering is harder to forecast than a flat monthly rate. If you send OpenTelemetry data from sources outside the included ones, check how it is metered.

Grafana Cloud

What it is. Grafana Cloud is the managed Grafana stack, covering metrics, logs, traces, profiles and k6 performance testing.

Who it suits. Teams that already run Grafana or Prometheus and want a managed service close to those tools.

Pricing. On Grafana's pricing page, the free tier is "Always free," with usage limits and 14 days of retention for metrics, logs, traces, profiles and k6 tests. Pro starts at $19 per month plus usage, with 13 months of metric retention and 30 days for logs, traces, profiles and k6. Enterprise starts at a $25,000 per year spend commit.

The page's own line, "Send more, charge more is broken. We are changing it," is Grafana's positioning for Adaptive Telemetry, not an independently measured saving.

Grafana Cloud bundles k6 load testing. If that is part of your evaluation, our performance testing tools roundup covers the category; this page does not assess k6.

What you give up. Pro is a base price plus usage, so the bill follows how much you send. Enterprise requires a commitment.

Honeycomb

What it is. Honeycomb is an observability service built around event data, with distributed tracing and an analysis feature called BubbleUp.

Who it suits. Teams that want unlimited seats and querying and can plan event volume in advance.

Pricing. On Honeycomb's pricing page, the free plan covers up to 20M events and 100M metric data points per month. Pro starts at $150 for 50M events (up to 750M) and 250M time-series data points (up to 3.75B), with unlimited seats and querying. Enterprise plans start with a base allowance of 10 billion events per year.

What you give up. Event-based billing rewards teams that can control event volume. If you cannot predict your event count, the plan ceilings matter more than the starting price.

Splunk Observability Cloud

What it is. Splunk Observability Cloud is Splunk's observability product, spanning infrastructure, APM, real user monitoring and synthetic monitoring.

Who it suits. Teams that want host-based pricing and know which tier of capability they need.

Pricing. Splunk's pricing page describes "simple, host-based entity pricing starting at $15 per host per month." Infrastructure starts at $15 per host per month, App & Infra at $60 and End-to-End at $75, all billed annually. The page does not publish usage or ingest components beyond the host entity in the sections read.

What you give up. APM, including Always On Profiling, appears from App & Infra upward, not on Infrastructure. Real User Monitoring and Synthetic Browser Monitoring appear only on End-to-End, so the capability you need sets your tier.

Elastic Observability

What it is. Elastic Observability is built on the Elasticsearch stack and offers logs, traces, metrics, synthetics and real user monitoring.

Who it suits. Teams with large log and trace volumes that accept usage-based pricing with separate retention charges.

Pricing. On Elastic's Serverless pricing page, Serverless Complete ingest for logs, traces, synthetics and RUM is "as low as" $0.09 per GB, and metrics ingest "as low as" $0.023 per GB. Retention is $0.019 per GB retained per month for logs, traces, synthetics and RUM, and $0.005 for metrics. Egress is 50 GB free, then $0.05 per GB. Logs Essentials lists ingest "as low as" $0.07 per GB and retention "as low as" $0.017 per GB-month. Synthetic browser tests are $0.0123 per run and lightweight testing locations $28 per location per month, both Complete-only.

"As low as" is not a guaranteed base rate; volume, region and plan qualify it. And because ingest and retention are billed separately, an ingest rate alone does not tell you what keeping data costs.

What you give up. Separate line items make the bill harder to predict. Cost depends on how long you keep data as much as on how much you send.

Sentry

What it is. Sentry is a developer-focused monitoring product. Its pricing page lists application performance monitoring, application observability, mobile crash reporting, real user monitoring, tracing, logs, session replay, profiling, and cron and uptime monitoring.

Who it suits. Teams whose main problem is application errors, release regressions and mobile crashes, and that want to remove per-seat cost.

Pricing. On Sentry's pricing page, Developer is free and limited to one user. Team is $26 per month billed annually with default pre-paid data and unlimited users. Business is $80 per month billed annually, with unlimited users, advanced quota management, SAML and SCIM. Enterprise is custom. Overages include logs at $0.50 per GB, uptime alerts at $1.00 per alert and cron monitors at $0.78 per monitor.

What you give up. The published plans and product list centre on application-level monitoring. The pricing page does not show how Sentry handles host or infrastructure monitoring, so verify that directly if it is a requirement.

SigNoz

What it is. SigNoz is an observability platform with a managed cloud service and a self-hosted Community edition.

Who it suits. Teams that want usage-only pricing, no per-user fees, or the option to self-host.

Pricing. On SigNoz's pricing page, cloud traces and logs are $0.30 per GB ingested and metrics are $0.10 per million samples. Cloud Teams starts at $49 per month including $49 of usage. Enterprise starts at $4,000 per month. The self-hosted Community edition is installed and managed by your team.

The vendor's FAQ describes a Teams Cloud free trial for testing with real data. That is a trial, not a permanent free managed tier, and it is separate from Community. Retention is selectable from 15 days to one year for logs and traces and from one to 13 months for metrics, so the per-GB rates do not hold across settings.

What you give up. Self-hosting means running the infrastructure yourself. Cloud is usage-based, so large volumes show directly on the bill.

Quash

Disclosure: Quash is our product.

What it is. Quash is a mobile, web and API testing platform. It generates and runs tests from plain-language requirements on Android, iOS and browsers, and validates API behaviour inside the same flow.

Who it suits. QA engineers and mobile teams who need to test an app before release, rather than observe it after release. It is adjacent to this list, not equivalent to it.

Pricing. Quash Platform has custom pricing, tailored mainly to test execution volume, with monthly or annual terms. Evaluation is free and starts with a demo call. See Quash Platform pricing.

What you give up. Quash's material describes pre-production testing and does not describe a production observability offering. A team that needs New Relic's job of tracing, dashboards, alerting or infrastructure monitoring will not replace it with Quash. It fits alongside an observability tool, not in place of one.

Which one should you pick?

Choose by workload shape, not by ranking.

• Many hosts, little telemetry per host: start with per-host pricing from Datadog and Splunk, and Dynatrace's hourly rates, and model your host count against each unit.

• Few hosts, heavy log and trace volume: start with SigNoz and Elastic, and check retention separately from ingest.

• Large, seat-heavy team: look at Honeycomb and Sentry, where seats are unlimited, and at Grafana Cloud's free tier if telemetry is modest.

• Errors and mobile crashes are the main pain: look at Sentry first, then confirm it covers the monitoring you also need.

• You must self-host or avoid per-user fees: look at SigNoz Community.

• You already run Grafana or Prometheus: look at Grafana Cloud first.

How we checked this

Every price on this page comes from the vendor's own pricing page or documentation, read on 2026-11-01. Where a vendor says "starts at" or "as low as," the wording is kept. Figures keep their billing cadence, such as annual versus month-to-month. No total is calculated for any product, because the vendors bill on different units.

Three things are outside this edition. Azure Monitor and Application Insights, AWS CloudWatch and Google Cloud Observability have no section here, because no current rate was established for them. Migration effort is also uncovered: no source checked documents what moves when you leave New Relic, whether dashboards, alerts, query language or history. Test a migration against your own instrumentation before you commit.

Conclusion

Before choosing among New Relic alternatives, find out what unit your bill is measured in. Hosts, memory-hours, events, gigabytes and seats each reward a different team, and the same workload can look cheap on one meter and expensive on another. Write down your host count, telemetry volume, retention window and team size, pick the two billing shapes that fit, and confirm the current rate on those vendors' pages before you sign.