Better Stack vs New Relic

Better Stack is an observability platform built by a Prague-based company of the same name. It started as two products, Better Uptime and Logtail, and now combines uptime monitoring, incident management, on-call scheduling, status pages and log and metrics management (Telemetry) under one account and one interface.

Monitors check HTTP endpoints, keywords, ports, DNS, SSL certificates and cron heartbeats from multiple regions, with check intervals down to 30 seconds on paid plans. Alerts go out by phone call, SMS, email, Slack and Microsoft Teams, escalate through on-call rotations, and open incidents that can update a hosted status page automatically. The telemetry side is built on ClickHouse: logs and metrics are queried with SQL, followed in live tail and turned into dashboards, with OpenTelemetry and common log shippers supported. The free plan covers 10 monitors, a status page and a small log allowance; uptime is billed as a monthly plan, while logs and metrics are usage-based per GB.

It fits startups and small to mid-size engineering teams that would otherwise pay for Pingdom, PagerDuty and Statuspage separately, and its interface is widely praised. It is not as deep as Datadog for APM, profiling and enterprise security, and PagerDuty remains more sophisticated for complex on-call and event routing. Uptime Kuma is the free self-hosted alternative for monitoring only, and Grafana Cloud is the main competitor on cost-efficient logs and metrics.

New Relic is a full-stack observability platform founded in San Francisco in 2008 by Lew Cirne and taken private by Francisco Partners and TPG in 2023. It collects metrics, events, logs and traces from applications and infrastructure into one telemetry database and lets engineering teams find out why something is slow or broken across services, hosts, browsers and mobile apps.

The platform covers application performance monitoring with distributed tracing, infrastructure and Kubernetes monitoring, log management, browser and mobile real user monitoring, synthetic checks, error tracking, AI monitoring for LLM applications, alerts and dashboards built with the NRQL query language. Instead of separate products per module, pricing is based on data ingested per month plus the type of users: basic users are free, while core and full platform users are paid seats. A permanent free tier includes 100 GB of data per month and one full platform user.

New Relic suits engineering teams that want broad observability with an easy start and predictable data-based pricing, especially when only a few engineers need full access. Full platform seats are expensive, data costs grow quickly at scale, and the interface can feel complex. Datadog is the main rival with a module-based model and a larger integration catalogue, Dynatrace targets large enterprises with heavy automation, Grafana Cloud suits teams committed to open-source tooling, and Sentry is enough when error tracking is the main need.