Our Verdict
Based on ratings, features, pricing, and capabilities, New Relic edges ahead in this comparison. New Relic offers better value and broader platform support.
Feature
Grafana
New Relic
Rating
No ratings
No ratings
Free Plan
Starting Price
Free
Free
Monthly Visits
15.0M
10.0M
API Support
Open Source
AI Capabilities
Mobile App
Desktop App
Browser Extension
Integrations
4 apps
4 apps
Team Size
ENTERPRISE
ENTERPRISE
Grafana Pros & Cons
Pros
- Free and open source with a genuine self-hosting option
- Connects to an enormous range of data sources, not locked to one vendor
- Highly customizable dashboards for any use case
Cons
- Self-hosting requires real operational maintenance
- Can require pairing with other tools (Prometheus, Loki) for a full stack
- Steeper learning curve than fully managed observability suites
New Relic Pros & Cons
Pros
- Genuinely unified data platform across APM, infra, and logs
- Consumption-based pricing can be cost-effective for variable workloads
- Strong dashboards and alerting
Cons
- Consumption pricing requires active monitoring to avoid surprise bills
- Feature breadth means a learning curve to configure well
- Competes closely with Datadog on most core capabilities
Grafana Key Features
- Data-source-agnostic dashboards
- Alerting engine
- Grafana Loki for logs & Tempo for tracing
- Self-hosted or Grafana Cloud
- Rich plugin ecosystem
New Relic Key Features
- Application performance monitoring (APM)
- Infrastructure monitoring
- Log management
- Browser & mobile monitoring
- AI-driven anomaly detection