Grafana vs New Relic comparison

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Grafana

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 24, 2024

New Relic and Grafana are popular tools in monitoring and observability. New Relic's all-in-one monitoring capabilities give it an advantage in providing a unified view, while Grafana's flexibility and open-source nature offer a powerful alternative.

Features: New Relic provides comprehensive monitoring and alerting capabilities, offering a centralized view of the application stack. It has advanced analytics and automated anomaly detection. Grafana offers versatile data visualization options, integrates with a wide array of data sources, and provides extensive customization capabilities.

Room for Improvement: New Relic needs better integration options, more straightforward pricing structures, and enhanced user interface navigation. Grafana requires enhanced user management features, more intuitive configuration processes, and improved alerting capabilities.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: New Relic is recognized for relatively straightforward deployment and robust customer support. Grafana offers flexibility but requires more manual configuration and has a steeper learning curve, with user reviews indicating room for improved technical support.

Pricing and ROI: New Relic users report higher setup costs but feel that the comprehensive features justify the expense given their return on investment. Grafana users benefit from lower initial costs, especially its open-source option, yet might need additional investments for advanced functionality.

To learn more, read our detailed Grafana vs. New Relic Report (Updated: June 2026).

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Grafana vs. New Relic

June 2026

Helped 907,768 peers since 2012

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

ROI

Sentiment score

5.4

Organizations using Grafana achieved up to 250% ROI, reduced costs, and improved monitoring and response times significantly.

Sentiment score

6.1

New Relic effectively enhances application performance by quickly resolving issues, saving time, and improving customer satisfaction.

I can say the estimated return on investment was one hundred fifty percent to two hundred fifty percent within the first year due to the reduced downtime and faster troubleshooting.

Devops Engineer at AIQOD

I identified over-provisioned servers and reduced my AWS monthly bill by 15%, which is a significant saving in terms of costs.

For more quotes and insights, download the Grafana report

System engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

There is return on investment because since we reduced the downtime, we can definitely save a lot of money within that period.

System engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

There is a definite return on investment for New Relic, as we would not have invested in building its infrastructure if there were no returns.

For more quotes and insights, download the New Relic report

senior software at Norton Lifelock

After implementing New Relic, we have decreased staffing requirements while saving time and money.

reviewer2805771

Senior Observability Engineer I at a computer software company with 51-200 employees

Customer Service

Sentiment score

7.2

Grafana's support receives mixed feedback, with praise for both its responsive technical team and effective community resources.

Sentiment score

7.3

New Relic's customer service is praised for its responsiveness and support, though some users desire quicker, clearer responses.

The technical support team is very helpful with complex PromQL troubleshooting.

System engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

My advice for people who are new to Grafana or considering it is to reach out to the community mainly, as that's the primary benefit of Grafana.

Adam Russak

Sr. DevOps at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees

The documentation is comprehensive, and the active community makes it easy to find solutions to common issues.

For more quotes and insights, download the Grafana report

Devops Engineer at AIQOD

If I drop an email to them, they will respond quickly to my email.

Vamsi Busa

Senior DevOps Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

Customer support from New Relic is very good, and we rarely need to create support tickets.

For more quotes and insights, download the New Relic report

senior software at Norton Lifelock

They are very polite and helped him out.

TusharGoel

Cloud Engineer at TO THE NEW Digital

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score

5.5

Grafana scales effectively with integrations, but some users find complexity and scaling costs challenging for extensive environments.

Sentiment score

7.6

New Relic is highly scalable, supporting varied workloads and environments, aided by seamless AWS integration and a flexible SaaS model.

It is highly scalable and built on a big data architecture capable of ingesting trillions of data points.

For more quotes and insights, download the Grafana report

System engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

In terms of our company, the infrastructure is using two availability zones in AWS.

Omer Cohen

DevOps Team Lead at Kadabra

In assessing Grafana's scalability, we started noticing logs missing or metrics not syncing in time.

Adam Russak

Sr. DevOps at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees

We currently use New Relic for tens of thousands of developers and hundreds of teams within our organization, and we have not encountered any scalability issues.

For more quotes and insights, download the New Relic report

senior software at Norton Lifelock

It is also suitable for cloud native architectures, SaaS, or software as a service, and for high volume data ingestion also.

TusharGoel

Cloud Engineer at TO THE NEW Digital

Regarding New Relic's scalability, it excels at the enterprise level for cloud integrations that can utilize tags.

reviewer2805771

Senior Observability Engineer I at a computer software company with 51-200 employees

Stability Issues

Sentiment score

7.9

Grafana is stable and reliable with minimal downtime, though resource optimization is key to maintaining performance and integration issues may occur.

Sentiment score

7.9

New Relic is stable, reliable, and efficient, with swift issue resolution, though minor performance hiccups occur occasionally.

Stable in the sense that we have experienced minimal downtime, and it performs reliably for day-to-day monitoring and dashboard visualization.

For more quotes and insights, download the Grafana report

Devops Engineer at AIQOD

When something in their dashboard does not work, because it is open source, I am able to find all the relative combinations that people are having, making it much easier for me to fix.

Omer Cohen

DevOps Team Lead at Kadabra

Once you get to a higher load, you need to re-evaluate your architecture and put that into account.

Adam Russak

Sr. DevOps at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees

New Relic lags sometimes.

TusharGoel

Cloud Engineer at TO THE NEW Digital

New Relic is stable based on my experience, as I have not seen any problems with the UI.

Oleksii Barybin

Contingent Worker at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

For more quotes and insights, download the New Relic report

Room For Improvement

Grafana's usability suffers from complex UI, limited reporting, and integration challenges; enhancements in security, AI, and flexibility are needed.

Users request plugin enhancements, better data retention, third-party integration, improved interface, and optimized alerting, dashboards, and pricing.

It would be better if they made the technology easy to use without needing to read extensive documentation.

Mbula Mboma

AWS Cloud Re-Start Program Specialist at Orange RDC (Congo)

Grafana cannot be easily embedded into certain applications and offers limited customization options for graphs.

Abdul Rahaman Abdul Rahim Lee

BI and Analytics Engineer at Sandvine Inc

I would want to see improvements, especially in the tracing part, where following different requests between different services could be more powerful.

reviewer1955814

Director of Engineering at a insurance company with 10,001+ employees

For more quotes and insights, download the Grafana report

If they could improve the customer support by reducing their SLA within three to five days, if they could remediate everything, that will be so much helpful.

For more quotes and insights, download the New Relic report

System engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

Using real-time data, if there are any malicious patterns or something happening, they can identify those.

Hari Rajendiran

Platform Software Engineer 4 at Nexthink

Because of the pricing model, organizations have experienced uncontrolled costs and were not able to afford New Relic.

Aditya Krishnakumar

Senior SRE Engineer at SentinelOne

Setup Cost

Grafana's open-source is cost-effective, but enterprise edition pricing varies by usage and infrastructure, with cloud options available.

New Relic's pricing is often seen as high but justified by its comprehensive features, despite confusing models.

There were no licensing costs.

For more quotes and insights, download the Grafana report

Devops Engineer at AIQOD

In an enterprise setting, pricing is reasonable, as many customers use it.

Vikash-Agarwal

Aplication Architect at Amazon

The costs associated with using Grafana are somewhere in the ten thousands because we are able to control the logs in a more efficient way to reduce it.

Omer Cohen

DevOps Team Lead at Kadabra

Considering the features New Relic offers, the pricing or cost setup has not been a blocker for our budget.

For more quotes and insights, download the New Relic report

senior software at Norton Lifelock

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for synthetic monitoring is that minions used to cost a lot.

Palak Bhawsar

DevOps engineer at a tech company with 5,001-10,000 employees

As we talk about pricing, it is not that much cheaper.

HemantKumar7

Senior Site Reliability Engineer at a tech vendor with 501-1,000 employees

Valuable Features

Grafana offers user-friendly dashboards, customizable visualizations, seamless integrations, effective alerts, scalability, and community support for enhanced monitoring.

New Relic offers real-time monitoring, easy dashboards, and alerting, enhancing performance insights with integration and predictive analytics.

Users can monitor metrics with greater ease, and the tool aids in quickly identifying issues by providing a visual representation of data.

Vikash-Agarwal

Aplication Architect at Amazon

The fact that I can join data from my SQL database with metrics from Prometheus in the same table is a feature I have not found performed as well elsewhere.

For more quotes and insights, download the Grafana report

System engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

You can check those metrics in the incident management tool by filtering the alert source as Grafana, and it helps in reducing production incidents because you can acknowledge and visualize the metrics from Grafana on time.

HemantKumar7

Senior Site Reliability Engineer at a tech vendor with 501-1,000 employees

Using New Relic speeds up troubleshooting and resolution, giving us a clearer picture of where issues are, thus saving time and effort.

Pietro Dell'Erba

Head of API at a marketing services firm with 11-50 employees

New Relic is very useful for teams that don't have much of a dedicated DevOps team but want to have observability for their platform, and it's an easy way to get started.

Aditya Krishnakumar

Senior SRE Engineer at SentinelOne

New Relic has positively impacted our organization by reducing errors, improving performance, and saving time.

For more quotes and insights, download the New Relic report

senior software at Norton Lifelock

Categories and Ranking

Grafana

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

7th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

New Relic

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

4th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

176

Ranking in other categories

Network Monitoring Software (9th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (9th), IT Operations Analytics (3rd), Mobile APM (2nd), Cloud Monitoring Software (3rd), AIOps (4th)

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Grafana is 2.6%, down from 6.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of New Relic is 3.8%, down from 6.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
New Relic	3.8%
Grafana	2.6%
Other	93.6%

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

Featured Reviews

Proactive monitoring has transformed how our teams detect issues and resolve incidents faster

Devops Engineer at AIQOD

For improving Grafana, the alert configuration could be more intuitive for new users. Dashboard management becomes complex in large environments. So if we have multiple environments and we have to manage our dashboards for them, sometimes it becomes complicated to manage all the dashboards. The learning curve is steep for beginners. More built-in reporting and analytics features would be helpful. Documentation for advanced features could be more detailed. Role-based access management could be simpler to configure. Performance could be optimized for very large dashboards with high cardinality data sources. Grafana could improve its alert configuration workflow and make advanced dashboard management easier for new users. More built-in reporting features would also be beneficial. A simpler onboarding experience for first-time users and more built-in dashboard templates for common monitoring scenarios would be helpful. Grafana is a powerful monitoring platform, but it could improve dashboard organization in large environments, simplify alert management, provide more built-in reporting capabilities, enhance plugin compatibility during upgrades, and offer better AI-driven insights for fast root cause analysis. For example, if we are hitting a CPU metric of ninety to ninety-five percent or a system load of seventy to eighty percent, we have to act on that. But if Grafana suggests something on that metric, such as an AI suggestion, it would be more helpful. We could get an idea of how to solve that issue. For the Grafana dashboards, they could provide more built-in compliance and audit reporting, enhance AI recommendations with clearer explanations of why an issue was flagged, enhance accessibility and keyboard navigation, add more native integrations with emerging cloud and DevOps tools, and improve scalability for very large enterprise deployments. Grafana is a mature platform, but it could benefit from better dashboard version control, simpler environment migration, enhanced AI explanations, more built-in reporting, and improved performance for large-scale deployments with complex dashboards.

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Real-time alerts have reduced server outage impact and support fast incident response

System engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

In the dashboard, if they could show a little more metrics regarding the application and related things, that would be how New Relic could be improved. Currently, there are things showing from the server level and application level, but it can be improved. That is what I felt. Regarding user interface, I do not feel much concern, but for some kind of issues when we are trying to get support from the New Relic team, their SLA seems to be long. They are taking seven to ten working days for resolving some kind of scenario or issue. That is a bit difficult for us. If they could improve the customer support by reducing their SLA within three to five days, if they could remediate everything, that will be so much helpful. When it comes to the customer support part, I felt they need to be a little more improved on that part. The support overall is good, but they can improve. That is the reason I have given it eight out of ten.

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

18%

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

14%

Outsourcing Company

Manufacturing Company

Construction Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	14
Midsize Enterprise	10
Large Enterprise	27

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	65
Midsize Enterprise	52
Large Enterprise	79

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Grafana?

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that it is very reasonable and has excellent community support.

What needs improvement with Grafana?

Currently, I do not think that any improvement is required, but there are multiple use cases.

What is your primary use case for Grafana?

My main use case for Grafana is to create and design dashboards based on the metrics provided by different exporters via Prometheus. We have different exporters, and we are creating different dashb...

Any advice about APM solutions?

There are many factors and we know little about your requirements (size of org, technology stack, management systems, the scope of implementation). Our goal was to consolidate APM and infra monitor...

What needs improvement with New Relic Insights?

I find New Relic to be somewhat expensive. Our team shares logins, contrasting with other applications where individual team accounts are standard. Pricing is a primary concern since New Relic can ...

What is your primary use case for New Relic Insights?

As an Application Monitoring Engineer, my primary responsibilities include ensuring the uptime of services, managing infrastructure, and monitoring transactions. I use New Relic to set up incidents...

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Product Reports

Download Grafana product report

Grafana

July 2026

Download New Relic product report

July 2026

Also Known As

No data available

New Relic Browser, New Relic Applied Intelligence, New Relic Insights, New Relic Synthetics, New Relic Servers, New Relic APM

Overview

Grafana offers a customizable, user-friendly platform for robust data visualization and integration, enhancing real-time monitoring with extensive alerting and collaboration capabilities supported by an active open-source community.

Grafana stands out for its flexible dashboards and robust visualization options, integrating smoothly with tools like Prometheus. This open-source platform supports diverse environments, aiding in the visualization of IT infrastructure and business analytics. Its alerting system efficiently supports real-time monitoring. While it is praised for its community backing and cost-effectiveness, there is demand for better data aggregation, intuitive interfaces, and enhanced documentation compared to competitors such as Splunk. Simplification of configuration and the interface is sought, alongside improvements in machine learning and reporting features.

What are Grafana's most important features?

Customizable Dashboards: User-friendly, richly customizable dashboards for precise data presentation.
Visualization Capabilities: Strong support for visualizing complex datasets from multiple sources.
Integration Options: Extensive compatibility with data sources and tools like Prometheus.
Alerting System: Efficient real-time monitoring and issue identification.
Open-Source Nature: Supported by a vibrant community, offering a cost-effective solution.

What benefits or ROI should users seek in Grafana reviews?

Adaptability: Supports diverse environments and use cases.
Cost-Effectiveness: Offers valuable features at a competitive price.
Community Support: Backed by an active and vibrant open-source community.
Collaborative Platform: Seamless integration with various data tools refining monitoring and analytics efforts.

Grafana is implemented widely across industries for monitoring IT infrastructure and visualizing business analytics. Companies utilize it to analyze server performance or monitor Kubernetes environments and payment transactions. The platform integrates with AWS services and other data sources to ensure observability and system health tracking, focusing on performance metrics through customized dashboards and alerts. Organizations employ Grafana to bolster observability and optimize infrastructure through robust data insights.

Grafana Labs

New Relic offers real-time application monitoring and insight into performance bottlenecks. Its customizable dashboards and APM integration provide efficient operational support, while server performance alerts ensure quick issue detection.

New Relic provides comprehensive monitoring of application performance, tracking bottlenecks across databases and front-end components. Users employ it for server and infrastructure monitoring, as well as analyzing key metrics such as CPU and memory usage. The solution's ability to integrate with tools like PagerDuty enhances incident management capabilities. However, users have expressed a need for improvements in query language simplicity, more detailed historical insights, and better mobile app monitoring support.

What are New Relic's most important features?

Real-Time Monitoring: Provides instant visibility into application performance.
Detailed Transaction Tracing: Identifies specific transaction issues quickly.
Error Rate Tracking: Monitors and reports on error occurrences efficiently.
Customizable Dashboards: Tailors dashboard views for specific needs.
APM Integration: Seamlessly integrates with application performance management tools.

What benefits and ROI should be considered?

Operational Efficiency: Quick issue detection reduces downtime.
Improved Debugging: Enhanced error analysis supports rapid problem resolution.
Comprehensive Monitoring: Offers a holistic view of application performance and user behavior.
Incident Management: Integration with incident tools helps streamline responses.
Efficient Alerts: Rapid alert systems ensure timely notifications of issues.

In industries like e-commerce and financial services, New Relic supports application performance monitoring to enhance user experience and system reliability. Organizations leverage its insights for optimizing performance, particularly in server operations and infrastructure management. Its ability to monitor API failures through synthetic monitoring is crucial for maintaining high service levels.

Sample Customers

Microsoft, Adobe, Optum, Sky, Nvidia, Roblox, Wells Fargo, BlackRock, Informatica, Maersk, Daimler Truck, SNCF, Atlassian, DHL, SAP, JPMorgan Chase, Cisco, Citi and many others.

World Fuel Services, Verizon, FootLocker, McDonald's, Trainline, Mondia Media, Confused, Costa Coffee, Ryanair, Marks & Spencer, William Hill, Delivery Hero, Skyscanner, BASF, DAZN, Veygo, Virtuo, movingimage, talabat, Australia Post, Tokopedia, Seven Network, Virgin Australia, Zomato, BigBasket, Mercado Libre, Lending Club