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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.

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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
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

How Do New Relic and Grafana Compare on Features?

FeatureNew RelicGrafana
Pricing modelfreemiumfreemium
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

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
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

Should You Use New Relic or Grafana?

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

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