What TrustRadius Research Says
New Relic Pricing 2022
Data is the heart of your engineering team, your product, and your company as a whole. You have to monitor it, maintain it and its performance. One of the best tools for data and application monitoring is New Relic. Their software platform was developed to make your engineers’ lives easier with smart, automatic, and powerful tools managing your data.
What is New Relic?
New Relic is a cloud based data monitoring and data management platform. Application performance management, or APM, (also used interchangeably as application performance monitoring) is one of the use cases they are best known for.
Industries they are popular with include retail, healthcare, real estate, and IT services. The New Relic platform can work with your data from the big 3 cloud computing platforms, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
New Relic APM cloud services are most frequently used by medium and small businesses. That doesn’t mean large organizations can’t use them. California State University and The North Face LLC are large organizations that utilize New Relic.
For those of you that have heard of New Relic before, you should know they’re changed the style of how their cloud services are offered as well as their pricing model. They call this new structure New Relic One. You can find the main page for New Relic One here, and you can also find their learning materials here, but an account is required for the actual lesson.
The change was made after listening to end-users, and brainstorming how to make services and pricing more user-friendly. It even included the new addition of a free tier to benefit small businesses. We go into more detail about the pricing in the pricing section of this article where we also breakdown subscription plans.
Engineering teams are encouraged to use New Relic One because it's “the next evolution of the New Relic platform.” It’s meant to be a more integrated and organized network of data for software developers, so they can spend more time on production and less time troubleshooting errors. It has the same access to the monitoring services mentioned above, and has the same subscription plans.
Teams will find that New Relic One is a highly scalable observability platform designed to streamline all major data operations. This can be data instrumentation, data ingestions, and machine learning based analysis for informed decision making.
Data instrumentation is the collection process of data. On New Relic (in general, not just on New Relic One) instrumentation is open source, so that pulling telemetry data from other agents is easier. Data ingestion is simply absorbing data from different sources, basically importing. Along with open source instrumentation, they also have open source hosting for your telemetry data.
For a great introduction to new changes in New Relic One version of the platform, see the short and rather snappy video below.
In terms of services, the New Relic platform offers a total of 16 powerful services you can access through their subscriptions. For information on their pricing model skip down to the next section. Their 16 data monitoring tools are depicted in the table below. In the table are links to each tool's individual page so you can take a more in depth look at their individual functionalities.
Other important capabilities you will find in the platform include an alert system for real-time notifications and their interactive dashboard for vital metrics.
Alerting comes with fluid ease of use for adding integrations like Slack or PagerDuty. Teams can expedite their response time to incidents through automated root cause analysis designed to help you detect, diagnose, and resolve issues swiftly.
The dashboards allow teams access to high-end data manipulation capabilities. You can build data visualizations, templates to organize, and sift through data easily with queries. Teams can even correlate and synthesize data from multiple sources as well as custom program the dashboard itself.
If you want to upgrade your dashboard, then you can personalize the functionality and user interface (UI) with New Relic Terraform for coding and NerdGraph API for configuration. Terraform is an integrated tool in New Relic that was designed by HashiCorp. It can be used for provisioning services and features on New Relic like dashboards and alerts.
NerdGraph was built on the open source software GraphQL and is another tool to enhance New Relic. It can be used on monitoring services to make custom changes to features as well as query data.
Something that can be confusing is the fact New Relic has some functionality that is open source and they have a freemium plan, but they are by no means free, open source software. Completely open source software is usually available for download and requires your own maintenance whereas with New Relic you pay for maintenance.
It can be confusing when a platform has open source aspects or is using open source software and offers it as a service. In those cases open source does not mean it’s being offered with no strings attached. In the case of New Relic, they are a paid service with free resources that become paid when you go over them.
For those interested, New Relic contributes to open source projects. Some of them are OpenTelemetry (mentioned in the table of their monitoring tools), and Pixie which helps monitor Kubernetes applications.
If you and your team want to learn more about New Relic, this document here is a great help for navigating the platform. The video below is a tutorial for getting started with the platform.
How Much Does New Relic Cost?
In 2020 New Relic updated their pricing model to be more flexible and affordable. Some users are grandfathered in with their old pricing (if they chose to), but new users will get the current system. For information on the old pricing model you can go here. The previous version was product-based so each of the 16 monitoring tools would have been a separate subscription whereas now it's an all-in-one service.
The pricing model for the platform is pay-as-you-go, based on your usage of their monitoring tools. The subscription plans were also upgraded so that they offer 100GB of free data ingestion, and free access to the platform for all basic users. Subscriptions have 3 different types of users, full platform users, core users, and free basic users.
A full platform user has access to everything. Core users can use advanced logs and the CodeStream integration, but they can't use important tools such as Kubernetes. If you want to add a full user it costs $99/month and a core user is $49/month. Basic users are completely free and you can add as many as you want at no cost.
For startups, New Relic offers extra credits and discounts with partners. Nonprofit organizations can receive free benefits if they’re eligible. You can find the application for startups here, and the application for nonprofits here.
With subscriptions there isn’t a catch per say, but you need to watch your usage. Your billing is based on usage and you only get billed when you go over 100GB of data ingest per month. From there the cost is based on the type of user and how much usage is accrued after the initial 100GB.
Each GB you use past your free, monthly usage costs 30 cents. You can find more information on pricing and billing here, such as how billable users are calculated and how many accounts are allowed per plan.
Standard | Pro | Enterprise | |
Cost per user | Beginning at $0 | Flexible pricing, see sales for a demo | Custom pricing for your team, contact sales directly |
Reminder that all plans have access to the 16 different monitoring tools as mentioned in the section above.
Their free tier would be the Standard plan but all plans get free monthly usage. The difference is the standard plan has more limits on capabilities because it is designed as more of a functional free trial that never ends.
The Standard Plan
The Standard plan allows one user account, 1 full platform user, and up to 5 full platform users. You do not need a credit card to sign up for this plan, but you will for Pro and Enterprise because they have custom pricing based on your company. Teams that don’t go over the free limits can essentially use the platform completely free, as long as you pay attention to usage.
Teams get default data retention, on-demand training for onboarding, and 500 free synthetic checks a month. Apart from that it's pretty limited in terms of control in the account. There is only community forum support if you need help and no HIPAA compliance or user management. It’s still a great plan for small teams to work with large amounts of data, but it's not worth it if you need multiple multiple accounts, or more user controls and support.
The Pro Plan
For Pro teams get extended data retention, and the ability to add multiple user accounts. The pricing for core and full platform users is custom so you won’t see that cost upfront. Teams can enjoy full admin capabilities like automated user management. For support you also get chat, email, and 24/7 availability.
The Enterprise Plan
With Enterprise the main difference is slightly more priority support and if you use Data Plus, more security. Data Plus is a tool for upgraded data protection, governance and scalability. It’s 50 cents per GB. With it you can have (in just the Enterprise plan) HIPAA compliance as well as FedRAMP level security for your data protection.
Not everyone needs this extra protection and performance, but it is worth it if you have a complex network of data to monitor and analyze.
What is a New Relic Alternative?
Datadog is another very similar data monitoring platform to New Relic. Their pricing is more similar to New Relic old pricing which was a separate subscription per service. They both have a variety of monitoring tools like APM, or Infrastructure Monitoring.
If you look at each platform's tools head on it may seem like one has more services than the other, but it's important to spend more time looking at each service. For example, Datadog has Real User Monitoring as a service but New Relic also offers real user monitoring in their APM and Browser Monitoring services.
The big difference is that Datadog is a stronger infrastructure monitoring tool, whereas New Relic is best for application performance monitoring. When it comes to satisfaction, end-user reviews say Datadog has great customer support while New Relic has strong scalability.
New Relic has more reviews and is a Top Rated software on TrustRadius, but Datadog also has strong positive reviews and services. You can see a breakdown of reviews between both platforms here. For long form pricing of Datadog you can go here.
More Resources
If you’re interested in any of the specific services the New Relic platform offers you’re in the right place. New Relic has so many IT and Data services they fall into a variety of categories. Below are the main categories New Relic is related to:
- Observability Tools
- IT Infrastructure Monitoring
- Application Performance Management (APM) Software
- Devops
- Digital Analytics
- Kubernetes Monitoring
- Log Management
- Mobile APM Software
- Network Monitoring
- System Monitoring
For those that have used any of the platforms discussed here, please leave a review to help other buyers make informed decisions.
