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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
4th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
160
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)
SolarWinds Server and Appli...
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
20th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
4.5
Number of Reviews
44
Ranking in other categories
Server Monitoring (10th), Active Directory Management (10th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of New Relic is 5.1%, down from 8.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is 1.3%, down from 1.7% 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 Relic5.1%
SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor1.3%
Other93.6%
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.
NikhilKalwint - PeerSpot reviewer
Monitoring over a thousand systems has improved decision making and operational visibility
From an advantage perspective, SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is comparatively cheaper from a commercial point of view. It is easy to install and configure, very user-friendly, and quick to get up and running, allowing you to see the early value adds in your organization. It is compatible with most technologies for monitoring with very few chances of incompatibility. Configuration also allows us to monitor all the technical parameters we are looking for, making it a very good experience for us. The alerting feature in SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is a main advantage, as it alerts based on threshold breaches and can raise tickets to the ticketing system, send SMS, and email notifications, allowing engineers to work on those tickets to resolve issues and avoid further impact. The visibility into server health is a beneficial feature that I am utilizing. We widely use various application performance metrics in SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor such as database monitoring and server monitoring, which are quite good enough for any monitoring solution. We utilize the customizable dashboards in SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable feature is the ability to manage the application flow."
"The best feature of New Relic is its simple look and feel, making it easier to use than other tools."
"The service maps that it creates, the health maps that it creates, the insights that it provides, etc., are all quite useful."
"It allows the restriction of privileges and control of users."
"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."
"We were able to integrate with the messaging tool, Slack, which meant that we got notifications whenever something was not quite right."
"Using New Relic speeds up troubleshooting and resolution, giving us a clearer picture of where issues are, thus saving time and effort."
"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."
"The most valuable feature of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is its powerful monitoring capabilities."
"The solution can be deployed quickly."
"AppInsight for SQL: Enables us to see the relevant error log entries on the same page as performance parameters."
"The solution is great for monitoring. If something is going wrong, we can immediately find the root cause."
"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."
"I find it to be a strong product suite, particularly when you need a comprehensive monitoring tool."
"SolarWinds is a very stable platform compared to others on the market."
"I have found the visibility into server health with SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor very beneficial, which we use on a daily basis."
 

Cons

"There are certain features that are not supported in New Relic, such as CATSEARCH, which allows you to do a full-text search."
"In addition, its difficult to have a predictive tool to see how the application would behave in the future when it basically only shows the historical data."
"They don't have an opportunity to share the dashboard with the public. If you want to share it with stakeholders or people outside the organization who just want to have a look at a couple of metrics, you can't do that without onboarding them to the product itself."
"They should bring the pricing down to be more competitive."
"I would like to be able to invest less time in IT and ad hocs. We should be concentrating on other issues."
"We would like a dashboard feature to be created for this product. This would allow us to monitor both the front and back-end of our UIs performance, and then report on it."
"The solution does not provide input on how the page performs in a big group. It just says that the page performance is bad, but it does not say what can be done to improve it. If they could provide some insight or guidance on how to make improvements, that would be a big help."
"The scalability can be improved."
"SAM's software-defined network monitoring capability is also low and could be improved."
"A lot of times, we have to do a lot of manual cleanups."
"When you implement SolarWinds on a larger scale my customers complain about the speed."
"Nodes in Azure are able to be monitored with the use of agents, but this does not apply to cloud service offerings that are not node based."
"Solarwinds should come up the same monitoring system for other certificate expiration alert apart from SSL."
"One product area that could benefit from improvement is the synchronization of licensing periods across different modules"
"I think they need to make reporting easier and more simple & dynamic."
"Downside of the tools is the web console are hung or crash. It need to improve the performance."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing is fine."
"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."
"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 price of New Relic could improve. It is expensive."
"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."
"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 and licensing are too high."
"The product is neither cheap nor expensive, and I believe that it is a competitively-priced tool."
"Price can always be lower. It is neither on the expensive side nor on the cheap side. We have worked with them for a lot of years, so we get a discount due to the size of the installation."
"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."
"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 solution is overpriced in terms of application management."
"I have always said SolarWinds is very “proud” of their products, meaning they are expensive. I cannot afford to purchase all the licenses I need for all the SolarWinds products."
"We pay around $ 2,000 to $ 5,000 yearly for the solution."
"Pricing and licensing is fair for what you get. It does have a great bang-for-the-buck appeal."
"The product is expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Retailer
6%
Computer Software Company
12%
Government
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Healthcare Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business65
Midsize Enterprise50
Large Enterprise61
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business17
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise21
 

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?
New Relic can be improved by incorporating an automated incident analysis solution. They have comprehensive enterprise data, and based on that, they could generate and forecast things. They can pre...
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: September 2025.
872,098 professionals have used our research since 2012.