New Relic vs Radar
New Relic and Radar are both uptime & monitoring tools. New Relic is aimed at enterprise and developers, while Radar is aimed at developers and small businesses. New Relic costs less, from $10/mo versus $149/mo for Radar. Both have a free plan.
Full-stack observability with a free 100 GB tier
Open-source Kubernetes UI and MCP server for engineers and agents
| Pricing | Freemium · $10 | Open source · $149 |
| Starting price | $10/mo | $149/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | 14 days |
| Built for | Enterprise, Developers | Developers, Small businesses, Enterprise |
| Platforms | web | web, macos, windows, linux |
| Country | US · 2008 | IL · 2023 |
| 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 Radar if
Platform and DevOps teams that want a free open-source Kubernetes UI and a safe way to give AI agents cluster context.
- Fully featured open-source build under Apache 2.0
- Single binary and desktop app for macOS, Windows and Linux, no account needed
- Read-only MCP endpoint lets agents inspect clusters safely
Look elsewhere if: Teams that need full-stack metrics, logs and APM in one hosted suite (Datadog, Dynatrace).
New Relic vs Radar 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
Radar
- Radar OSS$0Apache 2.0, unlimited clusters, one cluster at a time
- Cloud Free$03 hosted clusters, unlimited users, 100 investigations/mo
- Team$149/cluster/moScoped RBAC, fleet cost rollup; 20% off annual contracts
- Enterprise$299/cluster/moSSO, SCIM, SIEM export, self-managed; 20% off annual contracts
- CustomCustomAnnual contract, air-gapped, data residency, 99.9% SLA
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
Radar · Key features
- Issues queue that groups failures by root cause and blast radius
- Live topology graph and resource browser for any conformant cluster
- Event and change timeline with diffs beyond the one-hour default
- Helm release views with upgrades and rollbacks
- Argo CD and Flux drift detection, diagnosis and sync
- Cluster audit with 44 best-practice checks
Cons
- Per-cluster pricing gets expensive for large fleets
- Radar Cloud SSO and SCIM only on the $299 Enterprise plan
- Team plan keeps just 3 days of timeline history
New Relic vs Radar: FAQ
Which is cheaper, New Relic or Radar?
New Relic starts at $10/mo and Radar at $149/mo. Both prices are checked on the vendors' own pricing pages.
Do New Relic and Radar have a free plan?
Yes, both New Relic and Radar have a free plan; paid plans add more usage and features.
Which is better for small businesses, New Relic or Radar?
Radar lists small businesses as a core audience, while New Relic is aimed more at enterprise and developers.