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Grafana Cloud vs New Relic

Grafana Cloud and New Relic are both uptime & monitoring tools. Grafana Cloud is aimed at developers and enterprise, while New Relic is aimed at enterprise and developers. New Relic costs less, from $10/mo versus $19/mo for Grafana Cloud. Both have a free plan.

Grafana Cloud

Open-source observability dashboards

New Relic

Full-stack observability with a free 100 GB tier

PricingFreemium · $19Freemium · $10
Starting price$19/mo$10/mo
Free planYesYes
Free trial14 days—
Built forDevelopers, EnterpriseEnterprise, Developers
Platformswebweb
CountryUS · 2014US · 2008
Rating——

Choose Grafana Cloud if

Engineering teams comfortable with open-source observability who want control and lower cost.

  • Open source with no lock-in
  • Generous free cloud tier
  • Visualizes almost any data source

Look elsewhere if: Teams wanting turnkey, fully integrated APM (Datadog, New Relic).

Choose New Relic if

Engineering teams wanting full observability with flexible pricing.

  • Generous free tier
  • Unified platform
  • Powerful query language

Look elsewhere if: Teams needing only error tracking (Sentry).

Grafana Cloud vs New Relic pricing

Grafana Cloud

  • Free$010k metrics series, 50 GB logs/traces, 3 users, 14-day retention
  • Pro$19/moPlatform fee plus usage; 3 users included, then $8/user
  • Enterprise$25,000/yrMinimum annual spend commit; custom retention

New Relic

  • Free$0100 GB data ingest/mo, 1 full platform user, unlimited basic
  • Standard$10/first user/mo$99 per additional full user (max 5); data $0.40/GB over 100 GB
  • Pro$418.80/user/moMonthly pay as you go; $349/user on annual commitment
  • EnterpriseCustomContact sales; FedRAMP/HIPAA via Data Plus

Grafana Cloud · Key features

  • Dashboards over 150+ data sources
  • Prometheus-compatible metrics (Mimir)
  • Logs with Loki and traces with Tempo
  • Alerting, on-call and incident response
  • k6 load testing and synthetic monitoring
  • Self-hosted open source or managed cloud

Cons

  • More setup than Datadog
  • Query languages to learn (PromQL, LogQL)
  • Fragmented product surface

New Relic · Key features

  • APM and distributed tracing
  • Infrastructure and Kubernetes monitoring
  • Logs in context
  • Browser, mobile and synthetics
  • AI monitoring for LLM apps
  • NRQL queries and dashboards

Cons

  • Full user seats are costly
  • UI complexity
  • Data costs at scale

Grafana Cloud vs New Relic: FAQ

Which is cheaper, Grafana Cloud or New Relic?

New Relic starts at $10/mo and Grafana Cloud at $19/mo. Both prices are checked on the vendors' own pricing pages.

Do Grafana Cloud and New Relic have a free plan?

Yes, both Grafana Cloud and New Relic have a free plan; paid plans add more usage and features.

Not sure yet?