Most teams that leave New Relic are not unhappy with what it can do. They are unhappy with what it costs and how much platform they have to move through to answer a simple question like “why did checkout get slow after Tuesday’s deploy?”
This guide starts with what New Relic actually costs a small team, compares seven alternatives against it, and ends with a concrete plan for switching. It is written for development teams, not platform teams with a dedicated SRE function.
What does New Relic cost a five-engineer team?
New Relic bills on two dimensions: data and users.
- Data: 100 GB of ingest per month is free. After that, it is $0.40 per GB on the original data option, or $0.60 per GB on Data Plus.
- Users: Basic users are free but cannot use most of the platform. Core users are $49/month. Full platform users on the Standard edition are $10 for the first and $99 for each additional, with a cap of five. Beyond five, you move to Pro at $349 per user per month on an annual commitment.
Pricing from New Relic’s public pricing page, October 2026.
Here is a typical small team: five engineers, a Rails or Django app handling about 100K requests a day (roughly 3M a month), APM and error data mostly inside the free ingest allowance.
| New Relic (Standard) | Scout Monitoring (Medium) | |
|---|---|---|
| 5 engineers with full access | $406/mo ($10 + 4 x $99) | $0 (unlimited users) |
| Data or transactions | $0 if under 100 GB | Included (3M transactions) |
| Monthly total | ~$406 | $99 |
| 6th engineer joins | Must move to Pro: ~$2,094/mo for 6 users | Still $99 |
Two honest caveats. First, many New Relic teams keep costs down by giving most engineers Core or Basic access, which brings the bill closer to $250/month but means fewer people can use the full platform. Second, if only one person ever looks at monitoring and your data stays under 100 GB, New Relic’s free tier is hard to beat.
The bigger issue is predictability. Log volume, verbose spans after a deploy, or a traffic spike can push ingest past 100 GB without anyone changing a plan. Scout’s pricing is based on transaction volume, so the bill only moves when your traffic does.
The number is only half the problem. Teams that come to us after a surprise New Relic bill often say the harder part was finding what caused it. One CTO described getting “a very hefty bill” with no clear way to trace the extra ingest back to a source. If you cannot explain your bill from your own traffic, that is a sign the pricing model does not fit your team.
Quick comparison
| Tool | Compared to New Relic | Pricing model | Free tier | OpenTelemetry |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Scout Monitoring | Narrower scope, faster answers, no seat fees | Transaction tiers | Yes (300K transactions/mo) | No (native agents) |
| Datadog | Same breadth, different billing | Per host plus add-ons | Limited | Yes |
| Grafana Cloud | Open-source stack, more assembly | Usage-based | Yes | Yes (native) |
| Sentry | Stronger on errors, lighter on APM | Event-based | Yes | Partial |
| AppSignal | Simpler, Ruby and Elixir focused | Request-based tiers | Yes (30K requests/mo) | Partial |
| SigNoz | Open-source, self-hostable | Free self-hosted or usage-based cloud | Self-hosted | Yes (native) |
| Honeycomb | Deeper for distributed tracing | Event-based | Yes | Yes (native) |
How we evaluated
- Cost against New Relic for a small team, including user fees.
- Time to first useful answer after install.
- Framework depth: does the tool understand Rails, Django, or Laravel, or just generic spans?
- Migration effort from New Relic agents, dashboards, and alerts.
We sell monitoring software (Scout Monitoring), so we have a bias. We have tried to be fair about every tool on this list, including our own. For a broader roundup that is not focused on New Relic, see Best Monitoring Tools in 2026.
Scout Monitoring
Compared to New Relic: Scout covers application performance, errors, and logs for Ruby, Python, Node.js, PHP, and Elixir. It does not try to cover infrastructure, browser, or mobile. In exchange, the answers come faster: Scout’s agents detect N+1 queries and memory bloat automatically and point to the line of code, without writing NRQL.
Every plan includes unlimited users and apps, so you never decide who gets access based on cost. The Scout MCP server lets AI coding assistants query production traces and errors directly.
Best for: Development teams on Rails, Django, Laravel, Node.js, or Phoenix who mainly used New Relic for APM and errors.
Limitations: No infrastructure, RUM, or mobile monitoring. Uses its own agents rather than OpenTelemetry. Five language ecosystems, not every runtime New Relic supports.
Don’t use Scout if: You rely on New Relic for host, Kubernetes, frontend, or mobile monitoring, or your stack is mostly Java, Go, or .NET.
Datadog
Compared to New Relic: The closest like-for-like swap. Datadog matches New Relic’s breadth across infrastructure, APM, logs, RUM, and security, with deeper integrations. The billing changes shape rather than shrinking: per host for infrastructure and APM, plus separate charges for logs, indexed spans, and other products.
Best for: Larger organizations replacing New Relic across infrastructure and applications at once.
Don’t use Datadog if: You are leaving New Relic because of cost or complexity. Datadog is just as broad and its bills are often harder to forecast. Per-host pricing also punishes autoscaling: if your host count jumps during a traffic spike, so does your bill, and teams end up tuning their infrastructure around the monitoring invoice.
Grafana Cloud
Compared to New Relic: Instead of one proprietary platform, you get the hosted Grafana open-source stack (Mimir, Loki, Tempo) on OpenTelemetry. Your instrumentation is portable, but you build more of the dashboards and alerts yourself.
Best for: Teams that want vendor-neutral instrumentation and are comfortable assembling their own views.
Don’t use Grafana Cloud if: You want a tool that tells you what is wrong without building the views first.
Sentry
Compared to New Relic: Sentry is better at error tracking, especially across frontend and backend in many languages. Its performance monitoring is lighter than New Relic APM for backend bottlenecks.
Best for: Teams who mostly used New Relic for errors and want best-in-class error grouping and session replay.
Don’t use Sentry if: Slow queries, N+1s, and background job performance are why you have monitoring. See Scout vs Sentry.
AppSignal
Compared to New Relic: A much smaller, simpler tool with performance, errors, host metrics, and logs. Strongest on Ruby and Elixir, with newer Node.js, Python, and PHP support. Plans are request-based with unlimited apps and hosts.
Best for: Small Ruby or Elixir teams that want everything in one lightweight tool.
Don’t use AppSignal if: Python is your main stack and you want the deepest framework-level detail. See Scout vs AppSignal.
SigNoz
Compared to New Relic: An open-source, OpenTelemetry-native platform with traces, metrics, and logs in one interface. Self-hosted, it removes license costs entirely, but you take on running the storage and the platform.
Best for: Teams with the operational capacity to run their own observability stack.
Don’t use SigNoz if: Nobody wants to be on call for the monitoring system itself.
Honeycomb
Compared to New Relic: Built for high-cardinality questions across distributed systems. You can slice any trace by user, build, or feature flag. It goes deeper than New Relic for debugging many services, but it is less focused on classic APM views.
Best for: Teams running many services who ask open-ended questions about production.
Don’t use Honeycomb if: You run one or two monoliths and want answers without designing an instrumentation strategy.
When should you stay on New Relic?
Stay if you actively use most of the platform (infrastructure, APM, browser, mobile, and synthetics together) and your team knows NRQL well.
Stay if your app is small. New Relic’s free tier (100 GB of ingest and one full platform user) and its low-cost Heroku add-on are hard to beat for a side project or a single small app with one person watching it. Paid alternatives, including Scout, make the most sense once more than one engineer needs access or your traffic grows past what free tiers cover. Switching has a real cost, and a tool that already works is worth something. For a direct breakdown, see Scout vs New Relic.
How do you migrate from New Relic to Scout?
1. Install the Scout agent next to New Relic
You do not need to remove New Relic first. Add the Scout agent, deploy to staging, and check overhead before going to production.
| Language | Remove (later) | Add |
|---|---|---|
| Ruby / Rails | newrelic_rpm gem and config/newrelic.yml |
scout_apm gem and config/scout_apm.yml |
| Python / Django / Flask | newrelic package and the newrelic-admin run-program wrapper |
scout-apm package, plus the framework integration (for Django, scout_apm.django in INSTALLED_APPS) |
| Node.js, PHP, Elixir | New Relic agent package | Scout agent for your language, see docs.scoutapm.com |
Set your Scout key and app name through environment variables (SCOUT_KEY, SCOUT_NAME, SCOUT_MONITOR=true) and deploy. Data usually appears within a few minutes.
2. Run both for one to two weeks
Compare the slowest endpoints, the noisiest background jobs, and the top errors in both tools. They should agree on what is slow.
Use this window to measure your real volume, too. Size your new plan from what the new tool records, not from New Relic’s reports. One team we worked with found their actual traffic was about twice what New Relic had been reporting. This is also when you will see what Scout surfaces automatically, like N+1 queries, that you were previously finding with custom queries.
3. Replace NRQL dashboards with built-in views
Most NRQL dashboards on small teams answer a handful of questions: which endpoints are slowest, which queries are expensive, what changed after a deploy, and what is erroring. In Scout, those are built-in views (endpoints sorted by time consumed, traces, deploy markers, and error groups), so there is usually nothing to rebuild. For anything custom, use the API or ask through the Scout MCP server from your AI assistant.
4. Recreate only the alerts people act on
Export your New Relic alert policies and keep the ones someone actually responds to, usually response time on key endpoints, error rate, and a few background jobs. If you relied on New Relic Key Transactions, those map directly to alerts on the same endpoints. Recreate those with Scout alerting, and turn on anomaly detection for endpoints where a fixed threshold never worked well.
5. Remove the New Relic agent and downgrade
Once both tools agree and alerts are live, remove the New Relic agent, redeploy, and downgrade or cancel your New Relic plan before the next billing cycle.
You can start free and have Scout data next to your existing New Relic setup today.
Which New Relic alternative should you choose?
- You used New Relic mostly for APM and errors on Ruby, Python, Node.js, PHP, or Elixir: Scout Monitoring.
- You need a full replacement across infrastructure and apps: Datadog.
- You want vendor-neutral OpenTelemetry: Grafana Cloud, or SigNoz if you will self-host.
- Errors matter more than performance: Sentry.
- You run many services and need high-cardinality debugging: Honeycomb.
- You are a small Ruby or Elixir shop: Scout Monitoring or AppSignal.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the best alternative to New Relic?
It depends on why you are leaving. If cost and complexity are the problem and you run Ruby, Python, Node.js, PHP, or Elixir, Scout Monitoring gives you APM, errors, and logs with transaction-based pricing and unlimited users. If you need full infrastructure coverage at enterprise scale, Datadog is the closest like-for-like replacement. If you want to standardize on OpenTelemetry, Grafana Cloud, SigNoz, or Honeycomb are strong choices.
How much does New Relic cost for a small team?
New Relic includes 100 GB of free data ingest per month, then charges $0.40 per GB on the original data option. Users are billed separately: on the Standard edition the first full platform user is $10 and each additional one is $99 per month, up to five. A five-engineer team that gives everyone full access pays about $406 per month in user fees before any data overage. Pricing from New Relic’s public pricing page, October 2026.
Why is my New Relic bill so high?
New Relic charges for data ingest beyond the free 100 GB per month and for each full platform user. Bills usually jump because log volume, verbose spans after a deploy, or a traffic spike pushes ingest past the free allowance, or because more engineers were given full access. The source of the extra ingest is often hard to trace, which is why many teams move to tools priced on transaction volume instead.
Is New Relic free?
New Relic has a free tier with 100 GB of data ingest per month and one full platform user. For a side project or a small app with one person monitoring it, that is hard to beat. Costs start when you add full platform users or exceed 100 GB of ingest. Scout Monitoring also has a free plan with 300K transactions per month and unlimited users.
Is there a cheaper alternative to New Relic?
Yes, for most small teams. Scout Monitoring starts free with 300K transactions per month and paid plans from $19/month, with unlimited users on every plan. A team with 3M transactions a month pays $99/month on Scout’s Medium plan. AppSignal and Sentry also have low-cost entry plans, and self-hosted SigNoz has no license fee but requires you to run the infrastructure.
How hard is it to migrate off New Relic?
For APM, migration means replacing the New Relic language agent with the new tool’s agent and redeploying. Most teams run both for one to two weeks to compare data. Recreating NRQL dashboards and alert policies takes the most time, so start with the few alerts someone actually responds to.
Can I run New Relic and another APM at the same time?
Usually, yes. Most language agents can be installed side by side, which lets you compare data before switching. Test in staging first and watch for added overhead, since both agents instrument the same requests.
For application monitoring with errors, logs, and traces, Scout Monitoring provides the fastest insights without the bloat.