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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

"End-user Synthetics and monitoring are very good."
"It allows the restriction of privileges and control of users."
"We were able to integrate with the messaging tool, Slack, which meant that we got notifications whenever something was not quite right."
"New Relic's dashboard is nice, and it's reliable. It's also compatible with many services, especially Java and the Python ecosystem."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to receive in-depth information about applications. It can detect a lot of important information."
"The synthetics, alerts, and native inbuilt capabilities for monitoring the cloud with the New Relic agents have been helpful."
"The VPN is one of the solution's most valuable features for us."
"It has prevented failures from occurring in our production environment."
"The application dependency feature identifies issues between applications and servers or within the network where the application is hosted. It highlights related problems, whether related to packet processing or other issues, enabling the creation of alerts and reports accordingly."
"Monitoring of processes and services is the most valuable feature. It is not necessarily just the server alone in terms of the CPU or the memory. We can go in-depth into services and processes."
"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."
"It's good at monitoring system-specific things like ports, services."
"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."
"I am impressed with the tool's AppStack feature which mainly helps us in the identification process. This feature can give an overview of the fault and help us identify the issues for performance degradation. Instead of looking at multiple places, we can look at a single place to identify the issues."
"I find it to be a strong product suite, particularly when you need a comprehensive monitoring tool."
"The more valuable feature of this solution is the Exchange feature."
 

Cons

"The browser isn't exactly reliable."
"The UX/UI design of New Relic APM could be improved. The solution currently has some slow pages in terms of loading and viewing the pages, for example, the reports. The reports and other pages take a long time to load."
"How granular I could go down at looking at certain data, especially related to the operations, is limited."
"I would like to see the company implement the AI auto-baseline feature which Dynatrace has."
"The integration and configuration of this product in our AWS environment needs improvement on the filtering part. I would like it to go more granular on accounts."
"Data Dog captures the entire session and then provides it as a video player path, which gives more insight into what the user was doing. It's pretty impressive. New Relic does that, yet it only captures using a couple of screenshots, which is not very detailed since you are unable to see the entire user flow."
"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."
"Email alert customization is limited; it cannot be tailored much, which makes the system more rigid than optimal."
"Mapping interactions between systems."
"They should incorporate more artificial intelligence. There should also be more predictive features."
"It would be helpful if the solution could integrate more with the security compliances, like this IDSS, etc."
"The tool’s report feature created issues for us. We needed to gain skills to use that feature. The tool’s customization is not easy since you have to reconfigure the whole system."
"In terms of the dashboards on offer, they should work to improve them. The types of dashboards that you get in terms of the graphs on offer aren't ideal right now."
"Application-based monitoring, such as monitoring within servers like Apache and IIS, has room for improvement."
"SAM's software-defined network monitoring capability is also low and could be improved."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Because of budget, we are not using the mobile app part of this tool."
"New Relic is either free with low retention and minimal functionalities, or expensive with full options and retention."
"The pricing and licensing are good if you have an account manager and a partner manager who are looking to help out."
"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."
"We deploy everything on AWS. Purchasing the product on AWS Marketplace made it easier for us."
"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 is okay comparatively their competitors. The only concern was whether it should be purchased on demand or bring your own license, and which way passes some savings onto the end customers."
"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 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."
"The tool is available for my company at a good price point."
"We are on an annual license to use the solution. The price of the solution is expensive. The price is based on a bunch of factors, such as the number of engines and elements."
"The product is expensive."
"I think SolarWinds' pricing is very decent compared to other competitors in the market."
"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."
"I would rate the pricing for this solution a three out of five."
"I like the pricing for this SolarWinds product."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
19%
Computer Software Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Educational Organization
14%
Computer Software Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Government
9%
 

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.
861,524 professionals have used our research since 2012.