New Relic Reviews & Ratings

4.5/5

“Feedback From Peers Confirms Strong Observability, But Beware Cost Spikes”

When I compared New Relic to Datadog, I found NR more predictable initially and less rigid in pricing for moderate usage. But once we scaled up, the data volumes pushed costs high.

Pros : In peer comparisons, New Relic is praised for its full-stack observability, efficient dashboards, usage-based pricing that's more transparent for smaller scales.

Cons : As usage of logs, metrics, and hosts increases, cost can escalate; some unexpected bills happen if you ingest more data or have many users with elevated permissions.

Switched from : Datadog

Reason to switch : I switched from Datadog to New Relic because I wanted more predictable billing and unified full-stack visibility. For our mid-sized services, this worked well until logs grew; we had to carefully manage usage.

4.5/5

“Powerful APM + Telemetry, Steep Learning Curve for New Users”

When I first onboarded New Relic, I was a bit lost: so many metrics, so many options. But once I understood the structure, I was able to build dashboards that give me exactly what I need. It’s powerful but demands investment.

Pros : The APM tools are excellent; they let me drill into slow transactions, database queries, and see what functions are bottlenecked. The telemetry platform supports many integrations.

Cons : The interface and dashboards can feel overwhelming at first; configuration for alerting or custom dashboards takes significant time.

Switched from : Dynatrace

Reason to switch : I switched because those alternatives felt more packaged, but less flexible. With New Relic I traded a steeper learning curve for more customization and better observability over my applications.

4.5/5

“Good for Full-Stack Observability, but UI Can Be Clunky”

I often need to trace from front-end performance problems back into database latency. New Relic helps me do that. But on certain paths or endpoints, the custom views sometimes misbehave or load slowly.

Pros : I appreciate that New Relic covers from front-end to backend, infrastructure, logs, and tracing in one tool. Correlating user experience with server side issues is much easier now.

Cons : Some dashboards or visualizations feel less polished; custom visualization (e.g. specific endpoints, paths) can have bugs.

Switched from : Datadog

Reason to switch : I switched because Datadog’s UI was more cluttered and dashboards less consistent; I prefer New Relic’s cleaner full-stack correlation despite minor UI roughness.

4.5/5

“Rich Real-Time Monitoring, But Historical Data Limits Annoy Me”

In our operations practice, being able to see performance trends and usage over long spans is crucial. New Relic’s shorter retention for certain plan levels means I can’t always go back as far as I need.

Pros : Real-time monitoring and synthetic monitoring are good. I can see APIs as they perform live, enabling quick detection of outages.

Cons : We can only see ~30 days of data in some subscriptions, which prevents investigating incidents older than that; for long-term trend analysis, the time window feels narrow.

Switched from : Elastic

Reason to switch : I moved from Elastic because while it kept data longer, it lacked the usability and full-stack trace integration; New Relic gives me a cleaner UX and enough historical data when I upgrade.

4.5/5

“Strong Feature Set, but Documentation & Onboarding Could Be Better”

When I first introduced New Relic, installing agents across old servers and legacy systems took many trials. Some metrics didn’t appear, dashboards needed tweaking. Once set up, though, monitoring works well.

Pros : There is a lot you can do — logs + metrics + traces + synthetic monitoring, dashboards, real-user monitoring, error detection. Very powerful when you configure it.

Cons : New users often report confusion during setup; documentation can be unclear in places; managing agents for legacy apps is messy.

Switched from : AppSignal

Reason to switch : I switched because those simpler tools couldn’t monitor parts of our stack (e.g. legacy service, custom metrics). New Relic supports them, giving broader coverage.

4.5/5

“Solid for Large Scale, But Small Deployments Feel Pricey and Feature-Limited”

My company has multiple microservices and high request volume. New Relic scales well and handles telemetry at scale. For a small project it seems overkill or expensive, but for us, the scale justifies it.

Pros : At enterprise scale, data ingestion, querying, scale tolerates high traffic well. The benchmarks for query speed and uptime are good.

Cons : For smaller teams, billing surprises happen; some features locked behind higher tiers; retention limits for cheaper plans.

Switched from : SigNoz

Reason to switch : I switched because the open-source stack couldn’t keep up or integrate as nicely; New Relic gave a more polished, production-ready telemetry platform, even if it costs more.

4.5/5

“Excellent Integration, but Support & Pricing Can Hurt Small Teams”

Working in a startup, budget matters. New Relic gives me a lot of value and features, but when usage spikes or logs grow, the cost ratchets up. If your usage is small and stable, it's manageable; if you ramp quickly, costs surprise.

Pros : New Relic integrates well with cloud providers, Kubernetes, serverless; the plugins work nicely. Also real-user monitoring is good.

Cons : Many users find the pricing expensive especially when log or event ingestion grows; support response times vary.

Switched from : Clixtell

Reason to switch : I switched from a self-hosted stack because maintenance and scaling became a burden. Even with higher cost, New Relic’s hosted service offloaded that work and gave me reliable support.

4.5/5

“Some Frustration With UI & Session Management, But Overall Solid Platform”

I rely on dashboards throughout the day. When sessions expire or I have to log in again, it disrupts my flow. But once logged in, the data and monitoring are reliable and detailed.

Pros : The real-time app monitoring, deep visibility, and unified views are very helpful.

Cons : Frequent login session expirations; having to relogin or manage sessions manually is irritating. Also visualizing very large dashboards sometimes lags.

Switched from : Splunk Observabiity

Reason to switch : I switched from a platform that had poor monitoring depth (e.g. only logs or metrics) and lack of full-stack visibility. New Relic gave me that. Even with session annoyances, it feels like I get more insight.

4.5/5

“Good Incident Detection, But Alert Management Needs Improvement”

In one case, New Relic alerted me to a slow API path before customers complained, which let me fix the problem. But sometimes similar alerts fire repeatedly for different conditions, cluttering my on-call dashboard.

Pros : New Relic picks up anomalies, slowdowns, and errors automatically, allowing me to respond quickly. The alerting rules are flexible.

Cons : Handling duplicate alerts or overlapping incidents is cumbersome; incident noise is an issue.

Reason to switch : I moved from using separate alerting tools because integrating them was messy. New Relic gives both the metric/trace detection and alerting, so fewer moving parts to manage.

4.3/5

“Deep Visibility Into My Stack, Though Alert Noise Can Frustrate”

As an SRE, I depend on having a full picture of how my apps behave. New Relic helps me see everything: slow endpoints, infrastructure metrics, transaction traces. While occasionally noisy, it's saved me many hours chasing down performance issues.

Pros : New Relic gives me deep visibility into my applications and infrastructure using one unified platform. I can monitor front-end, back-end, database performance all in one place.

Cons : Sometimes the incident/alert system triggers too many alerts for similar or overlapping conditions; incidents don’t always auto-resolve and managing them takes manual cleanup.

Switched from : Datadog

Reason to switch : I switched from Datadog because its pricing was harder to predict for my usage, and I wanted better correlation between errors, logs, and user-experience in one place. New Relic’s unified tools delivered that.