New Relic vs Grafana(2026)
New Relic is better for teams that need generous free tier (100gb/month). Grafana is the stronger choice if beautiful dashboards. New Relic is freemium (from $0 (100GB free data/month)) and Grafana is freemium (from $0 (self-hosted free)).
Full feature breakdown, pricing details, and pros & cons below.
By Bikram Nath
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New Relic
New Relic is an observability platform offering APM, infrastructure monitoring, logs, and synthetic tests.
Starting at $0 (100GB free data/month)
Visit New RelicGrafana
Grafana is the open-source observability platform for metrics, logs, and traces with beautiful dashboards.
Starting at $0 (self-hosted free)
Visit GrafanaHow Do New Relic and Grafana Compare on Features?
| Feature | New Relic | Grafana |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | freemium | freemium |
| Starting price | $0 (100GB free data/month) | $0 (self-hosted free) |
| APM | ✓ | — |
| Infrastructure monitoring | ✓ | — |
| Log management | ✓ | — |
| Distributed tracing | ✓ | — |
| Browser monitoring | ✓ | — |
| Synthetic monitoring | ✓ | — |
| Dashboards | — | ✓ |
| Alerting | — | ✓ |
| Loki (logs) | — | ✓ |
| Tempo (traces) | — | ✓ |
| Mimir (metrics) | — | ✓ |
| Grafana Cloud | — | ✓ |
New Relic Pros and Cons vs Grafana
New Relic
Grafana
Should You Use New Relic or Grafana?
For most teams, New Relic is the better default: it offers generous free tier (100gb/month) and is freemium (from $0 (100GB free data/month)). Choose Grafana instead if beautiful dashboards matters more than can be overwhelming. There is no universal winner — the right pick depends on your budget, team size, and whether you value generous free tier (100gb/month) or beautiful dashboards more.
Choose New Relic if…
- •Generous free tier (100GB/month)
- •Full-stack observability
- •Good query language (NRQL)
Choose Grafana if…
- •Beautiful dashboards
- •Open source (self-hostable free)
- •Works with any data source