New Relic vs PagerDuty
New Relic and PagerDuty are both uptime & monitoring tools. New Relic is aimed at enterprise and developers, while PagerDuty is aimed at developers and enterprise. New Relic costs less, from $10/mo versus $25/mo for PagerDuty. Both have a free plan.
Full-stack observability with a free 100 GB tier
On-call scheduling, alerting and incident response for ops teams
| Pricing | Freemium · $10 | Freemium · $25 |
| Starting price | $10/mo | $25/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | 14 days |
| Built for | Enterprise, Developers | Developers, Enterprise, Small businesses |
| Platforms | web | web, ios, android |
| Country | US · 2008 | US · 2009 |
| Rating | — | — |
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).
Choose PagerDuty if
Engineering and IT operations teams that run critical production services and need proven on-call paging and incident coordination.
- Highly reliable paging, the industry reference for on-call
- Largest integration catalogue among incident tools
- Free plan is enough for very small teams
Look elsewhere if: Small teams wanting cheap, bundled uptime monitoring and paging (Better Stack, Grafana Cloud IRM).
New Relic vs PagerDuty pricing
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
PagerDuty
- Free$0Up to 5 users, 1 schedule, 100 SMS/phone alerts a month
- Professional$25/user/mo$21/user/mo billed annually; post-incident reviews
- Starter (Platform)$2,800/yr10 seats, 5,000 events, 1,000 AI actions; billed upfront
- Essential (Platform)$12,000/yr20 seats, 40,000 events, 4,000 AI actions
- Plus (Platform)$48,000/yr50 seats, 150,000 events, 16,000 AI actions
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
PagerDuty · Key features
- On-call schedules, overrides and multi-level escalation policies
- Alert routing, grouping and deduplication from 700+ integrations
- Push, SMS, phone and email notifications with mobile acknowledgement
- Incident channels and actions inside Slack and Microsoft Teams
- Post-incident reviews and operational analytics
- AIOps add-on for event correlation and noise reduction
Cons
- Costs rise fast with AIOps, status pages and automation add-ons
- Packaging and plan names change often, making comparisons hard
- Platform tiers require annual upfront payment
New Relic vs PagerDuty: FAQ
Which is cheaper, New Relic or PagerDuty?
New Relic starts at $10/mo and PagerDuty at $25/mo. Both prices are checked on the vendors' own pricing pages.
Do New Relic and PagerDuty have a free plan?
Yes, both New Relic and PagerDuty have a free plan; paid plans add more usage and features.
Which is better for small businesses, New Relic or PagerDuty?
PagerDuty lists small businesses as a core audience, while New Relic is aimed more at enterprise and developers.