New Relic vs Better Stack (Logtail)
A detailed comparison to help you choose between New Relic and Better Stack (Logtail).
Quick Verdict
4.0/5
New Relic
0 reviews
4.2/5
Better Stack (Logtail)
0 reviews
Better Stack (Logtail) is rated higher (4.2 vs 4.0). 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. Better Stack's Logtail is a modern log management tool backed by ClickHouse with SQL queries over your logs. Real-time tail, 15-day free retention, and integration with their uptime monitoring.
New Relic Full-stack observability — 100GB free per month | Better Stack (Logtail) Real-time log management and server monitoring for development teams | |
|---|---|---|
| Overview | ||
| Rating | 4.0 (0 reviews) | 4.2 (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 | Small-to-mid engineering teams that want logs, uptime, on-call and a status page in one product, with SQL-based log queries and predictable bundle pricing — especially those hosting data in Europe. |
| 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 tierapi access |
| Visit New Relic → | Visit Better Stack (Logtail) → | |
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
Better Stack (Logtail)
Pros
- + Genuine free tier: 3 GB logs, 10 monitors and a status page, not a time-limited trial
- + SQL over logs via ClickHouse — no proprietary query language to learn
- + Logs, uptime, on-call and status pages from one vendor with one account
- + Published per-region bundle pricing, including the Singapore surcharge
- + OpenTelemetry-native with eBPF collectors and pre-billing VRL redaction/dropping
- + On-call with unlimited phone and SMS alerts included at no extra cost
Cons
- - Responder licenses ($34/month each, plus $9 for workflow features) add up for larger teams
- - Enterprise status-page features (white-label, SSO, IP allowlisting) cost $250 per page per month
- - No published platform uptime SLA on the pricing page
- - US and Singapore data regions cost substantially more than Europe for identical bundles
- - Thinner third-party integration and dashboard ecosystem than Datadog or Grafana
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