New Relic vs Netdata
A detailed comparison to help you choose between New Relic and Netdata.
Quick Verdict
4.0/5
New Relic
0 reviews
4.1/5
Netdata
0 reviews
Netdata is rated higher (4.1 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. Netdata is a free, open source real-time server monitoring tool. 2,000+ collected metrics, zero configuration, and a beautiful dashboard. Self-hosted or Netdata Cloud.
New Relic Full-stack observability — 100GB free per month | Netdata Real-time infrastructure monitoring with per-second granularity | |
|---|---|---|
| Overview | ||
| Rating | 4.0 (0 reviews) | 4.1 (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 | Operators who want per-second infrastructure visibility without per-GB pricing, especially small teams and homelabs under five nodes that want data to stay on their own machines |
| 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 hostable |
| Visit New Relic → | Visit Netdata → | |
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
Netdata
Pros
- + Free Community tier is a real deployment: up to 5 active nodes with per-second metrics and local storage
- + Flat per-node pricing ($4.50/node/month billed annually on Business) — no ingest, cardinality, seat, or retention charges
- + Agent is open source (GPLv3+) with 80,000+ GitHub stars and 690+ contributors; data stays on your own infrastructure
- + 800+ integrations plus Prometheus, OpenTelemetry/OTLP, StatsD, SNMP, eBPF, and Nagios plugin support
- + ML anomaly detection runs in the agent at every metric, not as a paid add-on
Cons
- - Centralized dashboards cap at 5 nodes and custom dashboards at 1 per room on the free tier
- - RBAC, SSO, and SCIM require the Business tier even for small teams
- - No published uptime SLA for Netdata Cloud; priority support is an Enterprise On-Premise item
- - Operating at scale requires provisioning tooling (Ansible/Terraform-like) for consistent agent configuration
- - Dashboard customization is more limited than fully programmable alternatives; larger fleets effectively need Netdata Cloud
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