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Grafana vs New Relic(2026)

Grafana is better for teams that need beautiful dashboards. New Relic is the stronger choice if generous free tier (100gb/month). Grafana is freemium (from $0 (self-hosted free)) and New Relic is freemium (from $0 (100GB free data/month)).

Full feature breakdown, pricing details, and pros & cons below.

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Grafana logo

Grafana

freemium

Grafana is the open-source observability platform for metrics, logs, and traces with beautiful dashboards.

Starting at $0 (self-hosted free)

Visit Grafana
New Relic logo

New Relic

freemium

New Relic is an observability platform offering APM, infrastructure monitoring, logs, and synthetic tests.

Starting at $0 (100GB free data/month)

Visit New Relic

How Do Grafana and New Relic Compare on Features?

FeatureGrafanaNew Relic
Pricing modelfreemiumfreemium
Starting price$0 (self-hosted free)$0 (100GB free data/month)
Dashboards
Alerting
Loki (logs)
Tempo (traces)
Mimir (metrics)
Grafana Cloud
APM
Infrastructure monitoring
Log management
Distributed tracing
Browser monitoring
Synthetic monitoring

Grafana Pros and Cons vs New Relic

G

Grafana

+Beautiful dashboards
+Open source (self-hostable free)
+Works with any data source
+Active community
Complex to self-host
Grafana Cloud gets expensive
Steeper learning curve
N

New Relic

+Generous free tier (100GB/month)
+Full-stack observability
+Good query language (NRQL)
+Mobile monitoring
Can be overwhelming
Pricing based on data ingest (unpredictable)
UI complexity

Should You Use Grafana or New Relic?

Choose Grafana if…

  • Beautiful dashboards
  • Open source (self-hostable free)
  • Works with any data source

Choose New Relic if…

  • Generous free tier (100GB/month)
  • Full-stack observability
  • Good query language (NRQL)

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