Grafana is an open-source visualization platform excelling at customizable dashboards and cost-effectiveness for multi-source monitoring, while New Relic is a comprehensive SaaS platform offering deeper APM capabilities and AI-driven insights at premium pricing.
Grafana vs New Relic — Side-by-side comparison on A Versus B
Choose Grafana if you need maximum cost efficiency, deployment flexibility, custom multi-source dashboards, and prefer open-source software with strong community support. Choose New Relic if your primary need is comprehensive APM with AI-driven insights, you prefer managed SaaS with zero infrastructure overhead, and budget allows for premium pricing for enterprise monitoring.
Open-source visualization platform for metrics, logs, and traces across multiple data sources.
Full-stack observability platform offering APM, infrastructure monitoring, logging, and synthetic monitoring with flexible data ingestion.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM)
Structured comparison data for Grafana vs New Relic with 193 attributes.
Mean Time to Response (MTTR) Improvement
Supported Technologies (Languages/Frameworks)
Enterprise Annual License Cost (Single Server)
Monthly Platform Cost (100GB/month ingestion)
Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR) Improvement
Setup Time for Multi-Service Environment
Average Customer Satisfaction (G2 Rating)
Grafana vs New Relic — Attribute Category Vocabulary
Taxonomy of attribute categories used to classify comparison data for Grafana vs New Relic.
Can I use Grafana and New Relic together?
Yes, they serve complementary purposes. Many organizations use New Relic for APM/full-stack observability and Grafana as a visualization layer for infrastructure metrics and custom dashboards. New Relic can export metrics to Grafana via APIs, allowing flexible monitoring architectures.
Which is better for cost-sensitive startups?
Grafana is significantly more cost-effective, offering a fully-featured free open-source version with 15-day data retention. New Relic's minimum $99/month cost makes it less suitable for early-stage startups, though it excels once budgets increase and APM becomes critical.
Yes, Grafana includes alerting capabilities with multiple notification channels (email, Slack, PagerDuty, etc.). However, New Relic's AI-powered alerting with anomaly detection is more sophisticated; Grafana alerts are primarily threshold-based unless enhanced with plugins.
No, New Relic is SaaS-only and does not offer self-hosted deployment. If data sovereignty or on-premise requirements are critical, Grafana is the only option between these two, as it supports full self-hosting and Kubernetes deployments.
Which platform has better APM for microservices?
New Relic's enterprise-grade APM with automatic instrumentation, distributed tracing, and service dependency mapping is purpose-built for microservices. Grafana requires additional agents (Jaeger, Prometheus) to achieve similar observability, making New Relic the better choice for complex microservices architectures.