New Relic

New Relic has a genuinely useful free tier: 1 full-platform user, unlimited basic users, and 100 GB of data ingest per month. For small applications, 100 GB/month covers APM, infrastructure monitoring, logs, and browser monitoring. Beyond 100 GB, data ingest costs $0.25/GB (Data Plus $0.35/GB with longer retention, HIPAA/FedRAMP compliance). Additional full-platform users are $99/month (standard) or $349/month (Enterprise). This consumption model is often cheaper than Datadog for lower-volume workloads but can be expensive at scale with verbose logging.

Datadog is generally better for cloud-native, microservices, and Kubernetes-heavy environments — its agent coverage, UI polish, and integrations depth are superior. Datadog's per-host pricing is predictable for infrastructure-heavy workloads. New Relic is better for APM-focused teams that want deep code-level visibility (especially Java/.NET/Ruby apps), generous free tier usage, and don't want to pay per agent/host. New Relic's consumption-based model is friendlier for organizations with bursty rather than consistent telemetry. Large enterprises often prefer New Relic's consolidated MELT platform; startups and cloud-native teams increasingly favor Datadog.

New Relic provides full-stack observability across: application performance (APM) — traces, transaction times, error rates, slow queries; infrastructure — servers, containers, Kubernetes clusters, cloud resources; real user monitoring — browser page load times, JavaScript errors, Core Web Vitals; mobile monitoring — crash rates, HTTP errors, app launch times; synthetic monitoring — uptime checks and scripted browser tests; log management — centralized log ingestion with search and parsing; and distributed tracing — end-to-end request flows across microservices. New Relic AI surfaces anomalies and suggested root causes across all these signals.