New Relic is a comprehensive Application Performance Monitoring (APM) platform with pre-built dashboards and AI-driven insights, while Elasticsearch is a powerful search and analytics engine requiring custom configuration. New Relic excels for full-stack observability; Elasticsearch is better for log and data search use cases.
New Relic vs Elasticsearch — Side-by-side comparison on A Versus B
Choose New Relic if you need fast time-to-value, pre-built dashboards, and AI-powered insights for application performance monitoring across distributed systems. Choose Elasticsearch if you need a cost-effective, customizable search and analytics engine with unlimited data retention and don't mind managing your own infrastructure and configuration.
Full-stack observability platform offering APM, infrastructure monitoring, logging, and synthetic monitoring with flexible data ingestion.
Open-source distributed search and analytics engine for logs and data indexing
New Relic vs Elasticsearch — Comparison Data
Structured comparison data for New Relic vs Elasticsearch with 201 attributes.
Monthly Platform Cost (100GB/month ingestion)
Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR) Improvement
Setup Time for Multi-Service Environment
Average Customer Satisfaction (G2 Rating)
Monthly Cost (100GB index, 1M queries/month)
Total Cost of Ownership (3-year, 500GB/month ingestion)
Required Infrastructure Team Size (100 users)
Typical Query Latency (1B rows, GROUP BY)
New Relic vs Elasticsearch — Attribute Category Vocabulary
Taxonomy of attribute categories used to classify comparison data for New Relic vs Elasticsearch.
Can I use Elasticsearch for application performance monitoring like New Relic?
Elasticsearch alone cannot provide APM features. You would need to deploy Elastic APM Server alongside it, which adds complexity and requires additional configuration. New Relic includes APM natively. For pure log analysis and search, Elasticsearch excels; for full-stack observability, New Relic is purpose-built.
Is Elasticsearch truly free compared to New Relic?
Elasticsearch is open-source and free, but self-hosting requires infrastructure costs (servers, storage, bandwidth) and significant DevOps labor—often totaling $5,000-$15,000/month for enterprise deployments. Elastic Cloud (managed service) starts at $10,600/year. New Relic is SaaS with transparent per-gigabyte pricing. For very small use cases, Elasticsearch self-hosted is cheapest; at scale, costs converge.
How long does data stay available in each platform?
New Relic retains data for 8 days on the Standard plan; longer retention requires paid add-ons (30/90 days). Elasticsearch lets you set unlimited retention based on your storage budget. If long-term historical analysis is critical, Elasticsearch offers more flexibility.
Which is better for log aggregation and analysis?
Elasticsearch is purpose-built for log search and analysis with superior full-text search capabilities and filtering. New Relic handles logs but as part of a broader observability platform. For log-only use cases, Elasticsearch is more powerful; for integrated logs + metrics + traces, New Relic is simpler.
Can I migrate from New Relic to Elasticsearch?
Migration is possible but complex. New Relic's data model and Query Language (NRQL) differ significantly from Elasticsearch's Query DSL. You would lose pre-built dashboards and APM features, and custom queries require rewriting. Plan 4-12 weeks for a large-scale migration and extensive testing.