New Relic vs Grafana Cloud
A detailed comparison to help you choose between New Relic and Grafana Cloud.
Quick Verdict
4.0/5
New Relic
0 reviews
3.9/5
Grafana Cloud
0 reviews
New Relic is rated higher (4.0 vs 3.9). New Relic is a full-stack observability platform with a unique pricing model: 100GB free data ingest/month. APM, infrastructure, browser monitoring, synthetics, and logs in one platform. Grafana Cloud provides managed Grafana, Prometheus, Loki (logs), Tempo (traces), and k6 (load testing). Free tier includes 10,000 metrics series. Open source self-hosting also available.
New Relic Full-stack observability — 100GB free per month | Grafana Cloud Open source observability platform — cloud and self-hosted | |
|---|---|---|
| Overview | ||
| Rating | 4.0 (0 reviews)✓ | 3.9 (0 reviews) |
| Pricing model | freemium | freemium |
| Starting price | Free tier available | Free tier available |
| Best for | Engineering teams that want APM, infrastructure, and logs in one platform with usage-based pricing and a genuinely free starting point | Teams wanting a managed, self-hostable observability stack with a genuinely useful free tier and metrics, logs, and traces under one pane |
| Features | ||
| IPv6 | ||
| DDoS protection | ||
| Automated backups | ||
| Snapshots | ||
| Managed option | ||
| Bare metal | ||
| GPU available | ||
| S3-compatible | ||
| Hourly billing | ||
| Free tier | ||
| Tags | ||
| Tags | free tierapi accessteam features | free tieropen sourceself hostableapi accessteam features |
| Visit New Relic → | Visit Grafana Cloud → | |
New Relic
Pros
- + Best free tier in observability: 100 GB ingest/month, one full platform user, unlimited basic users, no credit card
- + No per-host, per-agent, per-container, or per-function charges — cost tracks telemetry, not fleet size
- + Published unit pricing: $0.40/GB original data, $0.60/GB Data Plus, $49 core users, $10/$99 Standard full users
- + One platform for APM, infrastructure, logs, browser/mobile, synthetics, and alerting with NRQL across all of it
- + Published support response SLAs per edition (2 business days Standard, 2-hour critical Pro, 1-hour Enterprise)
Cons
- - Pro full platform users at $349/user (annual) or $418.80 monthly make seat costs the dominant expense
- - Free tier hard-stops ingest and platform access past 100 GB until the next month or an upgrade
- - Uptime commitments are contract-defined and vacated on Standard — no availability SLA below Pro
- - Cost forecasting across ingest tiers, user types, and Advanced Compute metering takes real effort
- - SaaS-only with US/EU data residency; NRQL dashboards and alerts carry switching costs
Grafana Cloud
Pros
- + Open source core (AGPLv3) across Grafana/Mimir/Loki/Tempo/Pyroscope — a real self-host exit
- + Permanent free tier: 10k metric series, 50 GB logs/traces/profiles, 500 k6 VUh, no credit card
- + Public Pro pricing ($19/mo platform fee, from $6.50/1k series) with automatic volume discounts
- + 42 stack regions on AWS, Azure, and GCP including a Federal Cloud option
Cons
- - Usage-based billing punishes metric cardinality and log verbosity — bills can spike on app-side mistakes
- - PromQL/LogQL and label design have a real learning curve
- - SLA is 99.5% (paid plans only) — below hyperscaler commitments
- - Some enterprise RBAC/audit/reporting features require a quote-based Enterprise plan
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