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New Relic vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor 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

New Relic
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
6th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
159
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (18th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (12th), IT Operations Analytics (3rd), Mobile APM (3rd), Cloud Monitoring Software (5th), AIOps (5th)
SolarWinds Server and Appli...
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
19th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
5.0
Number of Reviews
42
Ranking in other categories
Server Monitoring (11th), Active Directory Management (10th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of New Relic is 6.1%, down from 9.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is 1.5%, down from 1.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

Rahul -Jain - PeerSpot reviewer
Good for application Performance Monitoring but not stable
There are two types of teams we have in every organization. One is for DevOps, and the second one is for performance testing. Those who are using these tools, like AppDynamics, Dynatrace, or whatever tool we have on the APM side. These tools are used by two teams: one is the performance team, and another one is the DevOps team. So, the setup and the alert system belong to the DevOps team, not for performance. So, I don't use any alerts in AppDynamics, Dynatrace, or any of the tools.
Carlos Camargo - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides user-friendly API features and has straightforward deployment process
One product area that could benefit from improvement is the synchronization of licensing periods across different modules. The misalignment of licensing terms can present commercial challenges when adding new modules or additional pollers. Additionally, the granularity of polling times for specific components could be enhanced to better meet individual customers' needs without impacting the entire polling pool.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The best feature of New Relic is its simple look and feel, making it easier to use than other tools."
"The most valuable feature of New Relic APM is the dashboard, New Relic Insights. I configured my own dashboard to monitor certain parameters."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to manage the application flow."
"The solution is good for sending alerts, drawing graphs about system usage, and creating plug-ins."
"We detect issues using dashboards that we built on New Relic."
"The most important thing is that it tells us where the latency in throughput and response time are."
"We use it for monitoring, identifying when services go down, or when they are outside of what we would consider normal operations."
"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."
"SolarWinds is a very stable platform compared to others on the market."
"It is simple to implement and can provide fairly decent Windows-based monitoring, beyond simple SNMP. It is great for monitoring newbies and smaller shops."
"The most valuable feature of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is the network devices' performance monitor is the best."
"There are many valuable features, including the network configuration manager, and the network performance manager."
"SolarWinds SAM has significantly improved our workflow by allowing us to develop a comprehensive knowledge base of known errors and automate responses to specific alerts."
"The product integrates with Remedy."
"Management Console - Managing service to each server enrolled in the Solarwinds is much easier. Using a web base console, you can control your service much convenient way. There is no need to login remotely. It save a lot of time and effort."
"Extremely user friendly: Any IT professional can learn how to admin NPM in a short time."
 

Cons

"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."
"I would like an infrastructure network that provides real-time views, showing the issues."
"The scalability can be improved."
"Documentation is one of the biggest things that I have a problem with since its documentation is not clear sometimes."
"Real-user monitoring would be helpful as it would help me to really understand the client-side performance of the application."
"The browser isn't exactly reliable."
"The solution could improve by having more network monitoring features, such as for all the infrastructure."
"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."
"Support for the IBM Mainframe is needed."
"The stability, flexibility, and ease of use could be improved."
"The product needs to reduce its price."
"For each poller, SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor can only monitor up to ten thousand components, which restricts scalability."
"It should also be easier to upgrade SolarWinds. AppDynamics is harder to deploy but easier to upgrade. So AppDynamics takes a lot of time and effort to install, but you can upgrade it in minutes. SolarWinds is the opposite. It's easy to deploy, but upgrades take forever. To date, nobody can complete it on time, so the production environment is sitting idle."
"When you implement SolarWinds on a larger scale my customers complain about the speed."
"One area that could benefit from improvement is its performance"
"I would like to see support for non-Windows or non-Microsoft domains, especially Apache and other non-Windows servers."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"Cost is significant with a lot of extras."
"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."
"The solution is quite expensive. It costs around $5,000 a month. There aren't any additional costs above that."
"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."
"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."
"The product is neither cheap nor expensive, and I believe that it is a competitively-priced tool."
"Purchasing through the AWS Marketplace was easy. The product is easy to deploy and manage, which is why our company purchased through the AWS Marketplace."
"Nagios XI, WhatsUpGold, Uptime Software, PRTG, Manage Engine, and SpiceWorks are the other tools that have lower pricing and licensing costs. However, they can't compete with SolarWinds when it comes to the features and functionality that SolarWinds can provide."
"The price is too high."
"The solution's price is reasonable. Though it's on the higher side, the tool is worth the money."
"We pay around $ 2,000 to $ 5,000 yearly for the solution."
"The licenses start from USD 3000.00 and go up to USD 20,000.00 for the year. It's a perpetual license. Nothing is free in SolarWinds, anything that you need is an additional cost."
"Pricing is inexpensive, starting at 2440 euros. For that, you get the ability to monitor a couple of nodes and one year of maintenance and support."
"SAM is not per server so the pricing model can be deceiving. If you have an enterprise environment, you will quickly exceed your licensing quickly. You should know this before going in."
"The product might cost you $30,000 USD to buy, but scaling this solution requires the purchase of additional polling engines at $20,000 USD each."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
14%
Computer Software Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Computer Software Company
12%
Educational Organization
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Government
10%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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?
Email alert customization is limited; it cannot be tailored much, which makes the system more rigid than optimal. The handling of logs from integration tools is not as advanced compared to other to...
What needs improvement with SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor?
There are no specific features or functionality I would like to see improved or enhanced in SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor at this time. I have not encountered any missing features or fu...
 

Also Known As

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

Overview

 

Sample Customers

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
Andr. L. Riis AS, NetSuite
Find out what your peers are saying about New Relic vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
862,452 professionals have used our research since 2012.