Instana Dynamic APM vs New Relic comparison

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Instana Dynamic APM

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 24, 2024

New Relic and Instana Dynamic APM are both popular application performance monitoring solutions. New Relic has an advantage in pricing and customer support, while Instana Dynamic APM stands out with advanced feature sets.

Features: New Relic offers comprehensive dashboards, extensibility, and straightforward deployments. Instana Dynamic APM provides automated root cause analysis, AI-driven insights, and deep observability.

Room for Improvement: New Relic needs better log management capabilities, enhanced system performance, and improved integration options. Instana Dynamic APM could benefit from better integration options, more detailed documentation, and further advancements in user interface.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: New Relic offers straightforward deployment processes and robust customer support. Instana Dynamic APM requires more initial configuration but offers competent customer service.

Pricing and ROI: New Relic is cost-effective and provides significant ROI due to competitive pricing. Instana Dynamic APM demands a higher investment but justifies it with advanced features and insights, achieving good ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed Instana Dynamic APM vs. New Relic Report (Updated: December 2025).

Instana Dynamic APM vs. New Relic

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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

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 December 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Instana Dynamic APM is 1.1%, down from 1.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of New Relic is 4.4%, down from 8.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
New Relic	4.4%
Instana Dynamic APM	1.1%
Other	94.5%

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

Featured Reviews

Muhammad Jawwad Hassan

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…

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ArjunSharma

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.

Read full review

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."

"Sometimes it's able to provide a proper RCA on its own. It's able to correlate different events that occurred and that becomes like an RCA in itself."

"Visually, it's very good. It provides everything needed for dynamic detection, which is very useful."

"If a key monitored value has crossed a threshold, it sends out an alert. And the solution is able to intelligently find out if something is beyond the range that it normally resides in."

"It's great for monitoring services and applications."

"The detailing of our application behavior and user experience is most valuable. In case there is an issue, we typically use Instana to figure it out. We can drill down to the application and figure out what's going on and where the issue is."

"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."

"Instana is very fast to implement and deploy because the dashboards are automated and don't need configuration."

More Instana Dynamic APM pros

"The synthetics, alerts, and native inbuilt capabilities for monitoring the cloud with the New Relic agents have been helpful."

"The solution is good for sending alerts, drawing graphs about system usage, and creating plug-ins."

"The initial setup is straightforward. It is easy to track and easy to follow."

"The monitoring so far has been good and we are happy with it."

"The stability of New Relic APM is very good."

"End-user Synthetics and monitoring are very good."

"We have done the New Relic integration with Serverless AWS, which has helped us with monitoring, and keeping our monitoring from our on-premise part with the cloud part."

"The breakdown of the response time of different components and getting in-depth details of the slow component are the most valuable features. It is easy to use, and it gets the job done."

More New Relic pros

Cons

"The App Connect middleware does not integrate with or show corresponding sub nodes."

"The configuration of Instana Dynamic APM needs improvement because it requires quite a bit of work."

"New Relic has a better UI in terms of how it presents the data."

"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."

"While it is already quite good, there is room for improvement in terms of providing better functionality"

"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."

"Many managers, as well as our customers, used to ask for reports, such as "top X number of queries that are slow," or "top pages that have the highest number of issues." This is something that can be improved by Instana. Currently, they don't have that kind of reporting available out-of-the-box."

"The auto-remediation features must be improved."

More Instana Dynamic APM cons

"I would like a feature where I can turn off alerting at a policy level. Thus, when a policy is inactive, I can shut down all of my alerts within the policy."

"I would like to have storage monitoring. E.g., being able to monitor SANS, specifically protocols, like NFS and CIFS metrics."

"There are certain features that are not supported in New Relic, such as CATSEARCH, which allows you to do a full-text search."

"New Relic can be improved by incorporating an automated incident analysis solution."

"Some of our customers see New Relic as a promising product to have, and we would like to deliver it to them. The only way we would be able to do that would be if we had server appliance for clients that we could install in their data centres."

"New Relic can get pricey for larger organizations."

"There are times when you restart the engines and the servers have a unique ID for the host and you need to remove the server. It is difficult because some are on-premise and others are production hosts. Having downtime is not very good when updating. However, it is not a constant issue."

"The solution needs to have staging."

More New Relic cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing is $1,200 per year which is a bit high compared to other vendors."

"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 solution is less expensive than one of its competitors."

"The solution's pricing is comparable to other products."

"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 price depends on how many agents you want."

"The pricing and licensing are too high."

"If I remember it correctly, the pricing was based on the core, and the monthly subscription used to cost us $1,500 or $2,000. We had pre-prod and production services. Costing was different for pre-prod and production. For pre-prod, it was 40% less than the production service cost. It was a combined package."

"This is an expensive product."

"The solution is less expensive than AppNeta."

"I rate the product price a five on a scale of one to ten, where one means cheap, and ten means very expensive."

"The pricing could be better. We did not purchase the full version. Maybe if we applied all the other features of the full version of New Relic, we could get all the features that we feel are missing."

"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."

More New Relic pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability solutions are best for your needs.

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

25%

Manufacturing Company

12%

Computer Software Company

Retailer

Financial Services Firm

15%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

Retailer

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	3
Midsize Enterprise	6
Large Enterprise	5

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	65
Midsize Enterprise	50
Large Enterprise	65

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...

Dynatrace vs Instana Dynamic APM

Comparisons

Compared 38% of the time

Splunk AppDynamics vs Instana Dynamic APM

Compared 13% of the time

Datadog vs Instana Dynamic APM

Compared 7% of the time

Broadcom DX Application Performance Management vs Instana Dynamic APM

Compared 6% of the time

IBM Application Performance Management vs Instana Dynamic APM

Compared 5% of the time

More Instana Dynamic APM Competitors

Dynatrace vs New Relic

Compared 11% of the time

Datadog vs New Relic

Compared 8% of the time

Splunk AppDynamics vs New Relic

Compared 6% of the time

Elastic Observability vs New Relic

Compared 5% of the time

Azure Monitor vs New Relic

Compared 4% of the time

More New Relic Competitors

Product Reports

Instana Dynamic APM

Download Instana Dynamic APM product report

Download New Relic product report

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

Instana’s Enterprise Observability Platform, powered by automated Application Performance Monitoring, discovers and maps all services, infrastructure, and their inter-dependencies automatically. Instana ingests all observability metrics, traces each request, profiles every process, and updates application dependency maps in real-time to deliver the context and actionable feedback needed by Dev+Ops to optimize application performance, enable innovation, and mitigate risk to help them add value and efficiency to the pipeline. Learn more at https://instana.com.

Instana

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

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

Instana Dynamic APM vs. New Relic