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Instana Dynamic APM vs New Relic comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 24, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

Instana Dynamic APM
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
30th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
14
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
7.0
Number of Reviews
163
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (9th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (8th), IT Operations Analytics (3rd), Mobile APM (3rd), Cloud Monitoring Software (5th), AIOps (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Instana Dynamic APM is 1.0%, down from 1.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of New Relic is 4.1%, down from 7.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
New Relic4.1%
Instana Dynamic APM1.0%
Other94.9%
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

Muhammad Jawwad Hassan - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Consultant at Arcana Info
A really good GUI that is easy for non-technical users to understand
Our company uses the solution for one of our bank clients. We use App Connect middleware to monitor services and applications such as Docker, Kubernetes, MongoDB, and MS SQL Server. We also monitor the bottleneck for all servers.  We currently have 20 users at one of our branches. We plan to expand…
ArjunSharma - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Engineer at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Continuous monitoring has improved incident response and supports data driven performance tuning
For our end-to-end use case, New Relic is completely satisfactory, and we extensively rely on its features for our day-to-day life. I would like to have more AI and ML-based suggestions and algorithms from New Relic, and while the New Relic dashboards and UI are customizable, they can sometimes lead to a clumsy behavior. A smart AI assistance to organize our dashboards and explain features and functionalities can be a wish-to-have feature to help us leverage what New Relic offers. As I mentioned earlier regarding wish-to-have features, New Relic can improve by incorporating more AI insights. When there is a component or UI customization, having a smart AI agent to guide users on customizing New Relic would significantly ease the process. This helps users who possess a technology-specific skill set and might find a learning curve overwhelming when using complex applications like New Relic or other performance-related tools.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"With Instana, the interface and the UI are very simple to use."
"With auto-discovery, we didn't need to consider much. We just installed the agent on the host and it was able to detect everything from the host level up to the service level, for whatever stack was installed, and that includes containers and dockers."
"We can easily perform root cause analysis using the tool."
"The primary selling point of this product is its unparalleled transparency into the infrastructure."
"The most valuable feature of Instana Dynamic APM is auto-instrumentation."
"Visually, it's very good. It provides everything needed for dynamic detection, which is very useful."
"The overall capabilities are the most valuable."
"It's great for monitoring services and applications."
"The synthetic alert is the most valuable feature in New Relic APM. I also like the time travel feature and find traceability useful in the solution. New Relic APM also has good response times."
"As New Relic is already integrated with Drupal, we can get our projects done with best practice and with the best value that we believe in."
"As soon as it monitors all our systems and is integrated with PagerDuty, the operations team just needs to wait for alerts on their cellphones to fix things."
"The solution offers good documentation."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to receive in-depth information about applications. It can detect a lot of important information."
"It has in-depth analysis using developer code for someone whose not traditionally a developer."
"They have baseline level alerting."
"Sometimes, I monitor the user's time of response and use this information to improve the number of servers on the back-end. Or, I can use it to change my back log for front-end developers and improve their response times. It's very important in this case because I can improve the experience of the final user."
 

Cons

"New Relic has a better UI in terms of how it presents the data."
"The solution's monitoring is pretty weak and should be improved."
"They could improve the product’s dashboards and provide more dashboard options."
"We'd always like to see additional functionalities."
"While it is already quite good, there is room for improvement in terms of providing better functionality"
"The auto-remediation features must be improved."
"I think that Instana should improve the university and the certification process, so the users can find experts in Instana with their certification module process."
"We should be able to go back to scenarios during or before the issue. There should be something like a history playback. Such a feature or functionality would be good."
"Compared to their competitors, they are missing some features at the moment."
"The price could improve."
"The solution only supports the cloud platform and not on-premises."
"One of the things that our enterprise actually had a challenge with was the licensing structure for New Relic."
"There has been some problem with the agent, and it is just not working well. It is not able to record information with the application server. They have been able to fix the issue, but it took quite a long time. This is the main issue in the APM products and also in New Relic. The mobile application monitoring has been pretty difficult to set up and also quite expensive. It should be a little bit easier and cheaper. Because it is pretty difficult and expensive, many customers don't take it."
"Some AIOps are missing in New Relic APS, and I would like to see more features in this area."
"How granular I could go down at looking at certain data, especially related to the operations, is limited."
"New Relic needs to improve is the user data schema."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is less expensive than one of its competitors."
"It's reasonably priced and manageable, especially for individuals who grasp the significance of application monitoring."
"Its pricing isn't a big pain point. Its pricing seems to be better than some of the other competing products in the market, but they also have some of the features and functionalities that are better than Instana."
"The solution's pricing is comparable to other products."
"Pricing is quite competitive. Dynatrace, AppDynamics, and New Relic were all several times more expensive than Instana, both the on-prem and the SaaS versions. Price-wise they are a lot more competitive than anyone else out there."
"Instana Dynamic APM is more affordable for small and medium-sized companies compared to other vendors."
"The pricing is $1,200 per year which is a bit high compared to other vendors."
"The new licensing model is great, as we pay for what we use (in computational units). However, the pricing is expensive compared to other tools."
"The solution is priced reasonably. New Relic APM is one of the best products for me because it's economical, so anyone can easily pick it over other solutions and use it."
"It would be nice if we could buy it annually instead of monthly."
"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."
"New Relic is either free with low retention and minimal functionalities, or expensive with full options and retention."
"This is an expensive product."
"The solution is quite expensive. It costs around $5,000 a month. There aren't any additional costs above that."
"We deploy everything on AWS. Purchasing the product on AWS Marketplace made it easier for us."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
25%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Computer Software Company
7%
Retailer
5%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Retailer
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise5
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business65
Midsize Enterprise50
Large Enterprise65
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Instana Dynamic APM?
The platform’s most valuable feature is the ability to monitor the performance of containers for request and response analysis.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Instana Dynamic APM?
I rate the pricing a seven out of ten. There are no additional costs associated with the product.
What needs improvement with Instana Dynamic APM?
Sometimes, the issue arises from user changes, such as adjusting firewall settings without proper consideration, leading to compatibility issues within the network monitoring.
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 do you like most about New Relic Insights?
The product's initial setup phase was very easy.
What needs improvement with New Relic Insights?
New Relic is priced on the higher side. Because of the pricing model, organizations have experienced uncontrolled costs and were not able to afford New Relic, which resulted in moving to open-sourc...
 

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

 

Sample Customers

Daxko Lifts Fitness Studios Through COVID Regulations with Quick Engineering PivotsAltissia Meets SLAs to Support Student DeadlinesImmocloud Unlocks Observability to Modernize Real EstateEnento Group Boosts Service Reliability with Real-Time Visibility into Application Performance Instana’s Observability for Amazon EKS Helps Yara Deliver Digital Farming Solutions
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
Find out what your peers are saying about Instana Dynamic APM vs. New Relic and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
879,422 professionals have used our research since 2012.