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Grafana Labs Logo
11,905 views|8,069 comparisons
New Relic Logo
25,149 views|19,771 comparisons
Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary
Updated on Jun 27, 2023

We performed a comparison between New Relic and Grafana based on real PeerSpot user reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.

  • Ease of Deployment: New Relic has an easy and uncomplicated initial setup process, while Grafana's setup process can be more challenging and time-consuming depending on the user's experience and use case. New Relic only requires a few commands and browser configuration, while Grafana's ease of setup varies. In general, New Relic's setup process is less complex compared to Grafana, which can take anywhere from minutes to weeks to set up.
  • Features: New Relic provides comprehensive application data insights and performance tracking, including end-to-end monitoring and traceability. Grafana, on the other hand, stands out for its visually appealing and customizable graphs, as well as its flexibility in integrations due to its open-source nature. Both solutions have proven to be stable and dependable, and have reliable technical support.
  • Pricing: New Relic's pricing is either considered expensive or reasonable by reviewers, with additional fees for extra features or data ingestion. On the other hand, Grafana's pricing is generally moderate and varies depending on the number of metrics ingested per day. Commercial use requires purchasing a license, and the price depends on infrastructure.
  • Service and Support: Documentation availability for New Relic is generally praised. Grafana's support has both positive and negative feedback, with some finding it efficient and others relying on the community forum.
  • ROI: New Relic's ROI is up in the air, with conflicting feedback from users. On the other hand, Grafana has a track record of generating a favorable ROI for businesses by enhancing data visualization and analytics, and delivering a transparent picture of their applications and infrastructure.

Comparison Results: Grafana is the preferred option over New Relic due to its open source nature, ability to customize and create visually appealing graphs, flexibility in integration with other tools, and reasonable pricing. While New Relic has reliable monitoring and offers in-depth application information, Grafana is known for its easy-to-use dashboard building and ability to connect with a variety of data sets. 

To learn more, read our detailed Grafana vs. New Relic Report (Updated: March 2024).
765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"It is a stable solution.""We can write queries in different languages, which is beneficial for visualization.""The best feature was the creation of graphs and trends.""The comparison feature is very good.""​Grafana has improved our analysis capability to solve an issue, increasing the co-working between IT services and business services.​""What I found most valuable in Grafana is that it has a lot of integrations and features that I need for data processing and visualization.""It is a stable, reliable product.""It integrates well with other solutions."

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"It offers helpful user metrics so we can learn more about the user experience.""It has helped us maintain a much higher uptime than we had previously.""The tool's most valuable features were APM and core reliability. We get alerts whenever an anomaly is detected. The solution is very friendly.""Their technical support is pretty good and responsive. We have a real good relationship with them.""New features are added often.""Server uptime is its most valuable feature.""The feature I found most valuable is being able to design my queries. It's easy to design a query.""The most valuable features are the dashboards and tracing."

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Cons
"Trigger limits are difficult to see in a graph.""The service dashboard is very hard and needs improvement.""​The security needs to be improved, such as the capacity to add permissions on dashboards.​""I would like the ability to download my results into any format in order to share the information with my clients.""Its interface could be more accessible.""It can take a considerable amount of time to learn the graphs if a long duration is selected.""There are not a lot of plugins for financial market monitoring.""Lacks event management which affects our DevOps people."

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"The deployment process could be improved.""It is complicated, especially in how you interpret the data that it provides. If it had a bit more canned, out-of-the-box features, especially some of the reporting features, that would be more useful.""One thing I'd like to see in any APM, especially New Relic, is the ability to use distributed transactions. When one microservice calls another, it calls another database and microservice. The entire data visualization layer will not be able to correlate from one microservice from end to end and return on that path. Distributed transactions would be a great addition that would make life simpler. Unfortunately, no APM has that end-to-end capability.""The solution is quite expensive.""New Relic APM could improve error debugging and the correlation with the logs. We are receiving some alerts or alarms but we need to correlate with the error log, but it is difficult if it is more than seven months retention period, it is hard to trace. We need this especially for getting historical information.""The older view is much better than the new view that they have. We'd like to go back to that previous version. The user interface just isn't as nice as it used to be.""It is a serious tool and requires a lot of time invested in order to understand how it works.""I would like to be able to invest less time in IT and ad hocs. We should be concentrating on other issues."

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Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "​Grafana is free and open source.​"
  • "I use the open source model so it is free."
  • "My company uses the open-source version of Grafana, so it's free."
  • "We use the open-source version of Grafana."
  • "We are using the open-source license."
  • "I give the price an eight out of ten."
  • "You need to purchase the solution's license for its commercial use."
  • "The solution is expensive."
  • More Grafana Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "New Relic is either free with low retention and minimal functionalities, or expensive with full options and retention."
  • "The monthly cost os $1000 per server per month, but it could be even more. We pay about $250 for the server, and then New Relic wants over $1000 to give us statistics on those servers."
  • "Cost is significant with a lot of extras."
  • "It would be nice if we could buy it annually instead of monthly."
  • "If it’s the right tool, it doesn’t matter what it costs because you’re going to get it back many-fold from your productivity."
  • "I recommend using the free version of New Relic. If you like the free version and understand its importance for your company, you can move to the trial. Then, you can migrate to the paid version."
  • "There is a picture which goes to your browser and it monitors requests from other users. However, it's impossible to use now because the price is very high. The feature is very nice, but I tried it during the trial period, and the current price makes it impossible to use."
  • "They gave us aggressive discounts when they were brought in for the first time, but they have also kept them for the year-on-year renewals, which has been absolutely fine."
  • More New Relic Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:The product's initial setup phase was very easy.
    Top Answer:For me, Grafana is a cheap tool because I don't have to spend much time learning the product since it is a simple solution. I don't know if there are different paid versions of the product.
    Top Answer:I have a problem with Grafana in the area of documentation. There is a problem in the area of some graphs where you connect elements. With Grafana, there is only one name that can be included for ten… more »
    Top Answer: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… more »
    Top Answer:It allows the restriction of privileges and control of users.
    Top Answer:The solution only supports the cloud platform and not on-premises. Therefore, they should assess supporting the licensing on-premises as well.
    Ranking
    Views
    11,905
    Comparisons
    8,069
    Reviews
    36
    Average Words per Review
    387
    Rating
    7.9
    Views
    25,149
    Comparisons
    19,771
    Reviews
    33
    Average Words per Review
    519
    Rating
    8.2
    Comparisons
    Azure Monitor logo
    Compared 13% of the time.
    Sentry logo
    Compared 12% of the time.
    Dynatrace logo
    Compared 11% of the time.
    Honeycomb.io logo
    Compared 8% of the time.
    Elastic Observability logo
    Compared 7% of the time.
    Dynatrace logo
    Compared 19% of the time.
    Datadog logo
    Compared 13% of the time.
    Elastic Observability logo
    Compared 8% of the time.
    Azure Monitor logo
    Compared 6% of the time.
    Prometheus logo
    Compared 6% of the time.
    Also Known As
    New Relic Browser, New Relic Applied Intelligence, New Relic Insights, New Relic Synthetics, New Relic Servers, New Relic APM
    Learn More
    Grafana Labs
    Video Not Available
    Overview

    Grafana is an open-source visualization and analytics platform that stands out in the field of monitoring solutions. Grafana is widely recognized for its powerful, easy-to-set-up dashboards and visualizations. Grafana supports integration with a wide array of data sources and tools, including Prometheus, InfluxDB, MySQL, Splunk, and Elasticsearch, enhancing its versatility. Grafana has open-source and cloud options; the open-source version is a good choice for organizations with the resources to manage their infrastructure and want more control over their deployment. The cloud service is a good choice if you want a fully managed solution that is easy to start with and scale.

    A key strength of Grafana lies in its ability to explore, visualize, query, and alert on the collected data through operational dashboards. These dashboards are highly customizable and visually appealing, making them a valuable asset for data analysis, performance tracking, trend spotting, and detecting irregularities.

    Grafana provides both an open-source solution with an active community and Grafana Cloud, a fully managed and composable observability offering that packages together metrics, logs, and traces with Grafana. The open-source version is licensed under the Affero General Public License version 3.0 (AGPLv3), being free and unlimited. Grafana Cloud and Grafana Enterprise are available for more advanced needs, catering to a wider range of organizational requirements. Grafana offers options for self-managed backend systems or fully managed services via Grafana Cloud. Grafana Cloud extends observability with a wide range of solutions for infrastructure monitoring, IRM, load testing, Kubernetes monitoring, continuous profiling, frontend observability, and more.

    The Grafana users we interviewed generally appreciate Grafana's ability to connect with various data sources, its straightforward usability, and its integration capabilities, especially in developer-oriented environments. The platform is noted for its practical alert configurations, ticketing backend integration, and as a powerful tool for developing dashboards. However, some users find a learning curve in the initial setup and mention the need for time investment to customize and leverage Grafana effectively. There are also calls for clearer documentation and simplification of notification alert templates.

    In summary, Grafana is a comprehensive solution for data visualization and monitoring, widely used across industries for its versatility, ease of use, and extensive integration options. It suits organizations seeking a customizable and scalable platform for visualizing time-series data from diverse sources. However, users should be prepared for some complexity in setup and customization and may need to invest time in learning and tailoring the system to their specific needs.

    New Relic is a versatile tool that can be customized to fit the needs of different organizations. Its primary use cases include performance monitoring, time series analysis, infrastructure monitoring, synthetic monitoring of APIs, and providing insight into UI performance. New Relic APM is a popular application monitoring tool that provides in-depth observability of an application's performance, including database queries, website response times, and page load times. 

    The solution provides clear information and a complete picture of what is happening in the organization's system, allowing for easy monitoring of servers and providing value in code detection and resolution and user experience metrics.

    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
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Retailer21%
    Computer Software Company21%
    Comms Service Provider14%
    Financial Services Firm14%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Financial Services Firm22%
    Computer Software Company14%
    Manufacturing Company10%
    Retailer6%
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm23%
    Computer Software Company18%
    Media Company9%
    Retailer8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization29%
    Financial Services Firm14%
    Computer Software Company11%
    Manufacturing Company5%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business33%
    Midsize Enterprise19%
    Large Enterprise47%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business18%
    Midsize Enterprise13%
    Large Enterprise69%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business35%
    Midsize Enterprise30%
    Large Enterprise35%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business14%
    Midsize Enterprise36%
    Large Enterprise50%
    Buyer's Guide
    Grafana vs. New Relic
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Grafana vs. New Relic and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
    765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Grafana is ranked 6th in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 38 reviews while New Relic is ranked 3rd in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 151 reviews. Grafana is rated 8.0, while New Relic is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Grafana writes "Agent-free with great dashboards and an active community". On the other hand, the top reviewer of New Relic writes "Has a simple user interface and end-to-end monitoring and self-healing features". Grafana is most compared with Azure Monitor, Sentry, Dynatrace, Honeycomb.io and Elastic Observability, whereas New Relic is most compared with Dynatrace, Datadog, Elastic Observability, Azure Monitor and Prometheus. See our Grafana vs. New Relic report.

    See our list of best Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability vendors.

    We monitor all Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.