Checkly vs New Relic

Checkly is a synthetic monitoring platform from Berlin built on the idea of monitoring as code. Engineering teams write API checks and browser checks in JavaScript or TypeScript, using Playwright for browser flows, keep them in the same repository as the application, and deploy them with the Checkly CLI or Terraform.

The same checks run in CI against preview deployments before a release and then continuously from global locations after it, so a broken login or checkout flow is caught by a test first and by monitoring second. Assertions, retries, alert channels such as Slack, PagerDuty and email, multistep API checks and heartbeat monitors are available, and traces connect a failed check to backend spans through OpenTelemetry. A free Hobby plan includes a monthly quota of API and browser check runs; Starter and Team plans add runs, locations and collaboration, and Enterprise adds SSO and private locations inside your own network.

Checkly fits teams that already write Playwright tests and want one source of truth for end-to-end testing and production monitoring. It requires coding and is not a full observability suite, so it is a poor fit for non-technical teams who only want uptime pings. Better Stack and UptimeRobot are simpler for basic uptime and status pages, Datadog Synthetics suits teams already on Datadog, and Grafana Cloud offers synthetic monitoring inside its own stack.

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.