You're here because you're either paying too much for New Relic, drowning in dashboards you never asked for, or you've heard there might be something simpler. Let me give you the straight answer.
The Short List
Choose New Relic if: You're a large enterprise with a dedicated observability team, you need to monitor 15+ languages and technologies, and budget isn't a primary concern.
Choose Scout if: You're a development team building with Rails, Django, Elixir, or PHP, you want answers instead of dashboards, and you'd rather spend money on engineers than monitoring bills.
Now let me tell you why.
The Pricing Reality
There's a growing conversation in the industry about what people are calling the "seat tax", the practice of charging per user for access to observability data. The argument goes like this: when you charge per seat, you're essentially penalizing collaboration. Teams start rationing access to monitoring tools, which is exactly backwards from how modern engineering should work.
New Relic offers two pricing models, and neither is straightforward:
User-based pricing:
- $99-$349/month per full platform user (depending on tier)
- Core users at $49/month each
- Plus $0.30-$0.50 per GB of data ingested
- Plus additional costs for extended retention and advanced features
Compute-based pricing:
- Charges based on "Compute Capacity Units" (CCUs) — a proprietary metric for every dashboard refresh, page load, and query
- Removes seat limits but introduces unpredictable costs
- Advanced AI features consume premium "Advanced Compute Units" (aCCUs)
A 10-person engineering team on New Relic Pro with user-based pricing? You're looking at $3,500-$4,000/month before data ingestion. And that bill keeps climbing as you hire.
Scout's pricing:
- Free: $0/month — 300K transactions, includes errors and logs data, community support
- Startup: $19/month — 600K transactions
- Small: $39/month — 1.2M transactions, priority support
- Medium: $99/month — 3M transactions
- Large: $299/month — 9M transactions
- Enterprise: Custom pricing with SSO, compliance, SLA reporting
Every plan includes unlimited users and unlimited applications.
Your whole team gets access, not limited access, not tier access to some things, full access. We don't believe you should have to choose between giving your junior dev access to production traces or staying under budget. In fact, your junior devs will learn a LOT from access to your production data and probably be able to answer some of their own questions that would have otherwise ended up in your inbox.
The Hidden Cost: Complexity Tax
There's another cost nobody puts on the invoice: the time your senior engineers spend becoming New Relic experts instead of shipping features.
New Relic has 50+ capabilities. Depending on what you need, that's not a feature, that's a full-time job. When was the last time you actually used New Relic's Kubernetes monitoring, their synthetic testing, their AI ops, their browser monitoring, their mobile monitoring, their serverless monitoring, and their infrastructure monitoring... all at the same time?
You're paying for a full buffet and eating the salad bar.
Specialist vs. Generalist: Why It Matters
New Relic monitors everything. Java, .NET, Go, Node, Ruby, Python, PHP, mobile apps, browsers, infrastructure, Kubernetes, serverless, IoT, and whatever else they've added since I started writing this sentence.
Scout monitors Rails, Django, Elixir, and PHP. That's it for now.
And that's the point.
When you build deep expertise in specific frameworks instead of surface-level support for everything, you get:
Actually valuable insights, not just data
Scout's agents understand Rails conventions. When you have an N+1 query in your ActiveRecord code, we don't just show you "database time increased." We show you exactly which has_many association is missing an includes() and link you to the line of code.
Same with Django. Same with Phoenix. Same with Laravel.
New Relic shows you charts. Scout shows you what to fix.
Framework-native instrumentation
Our Ruby agent knows about Sidekiq, Delayed Job, and Resque out of the box. Our Python agent understands Celery. Our Elixir agent speaks OTP.
We're not treating your framework like a generic "web application." We understand how your stack actually works.
Lower overhead, better accuracy
When you don't have to support 50+ technologies, you can optimize the hell out of the ones you do support. Our Ruby agent benchmarks at 2.2% overhead.
The Full Stack You Actually Need
"But Scout doesn't have logs/errors/etc. monitoring!"
We get this a lot. And it used to be true. Here's what's true now:
APM + Logs + Errors = One Platform
We added Log Management (all tiers include 1 GB free, with a $40/month add-on for 30GB) that correlates directly with your performance traces. When a request is slow, you see the logs for that specific request—not a separate logging tool where you have to hunt with timestamps and prayer.
We added Error Monitoring (all tiers include 5000 free, with a $19/month add-on for 50K errors) that groups errors intelligently and connects them to the traces where they occurred. No more "I see an error spike in Sentry, but I can't figure out what endpoint is causing it."
It's all connected because it should be.
The MCP Server: AI-Native Monitoring
Here's where it gets interesting. We built an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server that lets AI assistants query your monitoring data directly.
Instead of clicking through dashboards, you can ask Claude: "What's causing the slowdown in production right now?" and get an actual answer with traces, queries, and code paths.
This isn't a gimmick—it's the future of how developers interact with their observability tools. And Scout is the first APM to ship it.
Compare this to New Relic's approach: they've introduced "Advanced Compute Units" for AI features, meaning the more you use AI to debug your system, the more you pay. We think that's backwards.
Support That Actually Helps
Let me tell you a story. A Scout customer had a weird memory issue in their Rails app outside of business hours. They pinged our Discord. One of our engineers, not a support rep, an actual engineer who works on the product, jumped in and helped them trace it to a gem interaction within an hour.
Try that with New Relic.
Their "support" at the Standard tier is ticketed. Pro gets you a 2-hour SLA for critical issues. Enterprise gets priority routing.
Our support?
- Email and Discord during business hours
- Direct access to engineers who built the product
- We actually want to help you because we're a small team that gives a damn
When you're a customer, you're not a ticket number. We know your name. We know your stack. And when you have a problem, we take it personally.
The Side-by-Side Comparison
Pricing model
- New Relic: Per-user OR per-compute
- Scout: Per-transaction (unlimited users)
Team of 10 engineers
- New Relic: $3,500-4,000+/mo
- Scout: $99-299/mo
Add another engineer
- New Relic: +$99-349/mo
- Scout: $0
Languages supported
- New Relic: 15+
- Scout: 4 (Rails, Django, Elixir, PHP)
Framework depth
- New Relic: Surface-level
- Scout: Deep, native understanding
Logs
- New Relic: Separate pricing
- Scout: $40/mo add-on
Error monitoring
- New Relic: Separate pricing
- Scout: $19/mo add-on
Agent overhead
- New Relic: 44.5% (benchmarked)
- Scout: 2.2% (benchmarked)
MCP/AI integration
- New Relic: Costs extra (aCCUs)
- Scout: Included
Support model
- New Relic: Tiered by spend
- Scout: Direct engineer access
Setup time
- New Relic: Days to weeks
- Scout: Minutes
Contracts required
- New Relic: Often annual
- Scout: No contracts, cancel anytime
When New Relic Actually Makes Sense
I'm not going to pretend Scout is right for everyone. New Relic is the better choice if:
- You have a polyglot architecture spanning Java, .NET, Go, and other languages we don't support
- You need browser/mobile real user monitoring as a core feature
- You have a dedicated observability team that can manage the complexity
- You're in a highly regulated enterprise that requires specific compliance certifications
- Budget genuinely isn't a constraint
If that's you, New Relic is a solid choice.
When Scout Is the Obvious Choice
Scout is built for you if:
- You're building with Rails, Django, Elixir, or PHP
- You want answers, not dashboards
- Your whole team needs access without per-seat pricing
- You want one tool that does APM, logs, and errors without complexity
- Your team is 5-50 engineers who need to ship, not manage monitoring tools
- You want support from people who know your framework
- You're interested in AI-native monitoring with MCP (without paying per query)
On the fence? Try Both.
Our advice: install Scout alongside New Relic for two weeks. We offer a free tier with 300K transactions, no credit card required. It takes about 5 minutes to set up.
Then ask yourself one question: Which tool helped your team ship faster?
Not which tool has more features. Not which tool has better marketing. Which one actually helped you find and fix a bug faster?
That's the only metric that matters.
Scout Monitoring is application performance monitoring for teams who'd rather ship features than manage dashboards. We support Ruby, Python, PHP, and Elixir with deep framework integration, included log management and error monitoring add-ons, and an MCP server for AI-native observability. Unlimited users on every plan.
