New Relic vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor vs Splunk AppDynamics comparison

New Relic and SolarWinds are both solutions in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category. New Relic is ranked #4 with an average rating of 8.1, while SolarWinds is ranked #22 with an average rating of 7.6. New Relic holds a 4.0% mindshare in APM, compared to SolarWinds’s 1.3% mindshare. Additionally, 94% of New Relic users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 89% of SolarWinds users who would recommend it.

New Relic

Read 173 New Relic reviews

14,037 Views
10,387 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

SolarWinds Server and Appli...

Read 44 SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor reviews

4,708 Views
2,919 Comparison Views

89% willing to recommend

Splunk AppDynamics

Read 267 Splunk AppDynamics reviews

16,401 Views
12,301 Comparison Views

91% willing to recommend

New Relic

SolarWinds Server and Appli...

Splunk AppDynamics

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between New Relic, SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor, and Splunk AppDynamics based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Datadog, Dynatrace, Splunk and others in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability.

To learn more, read our detailed Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Report (Updated: March 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

March 2026

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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:

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2026, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of New Relic is 4.0%, down from 7.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is 1.3%, down from 1.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Splunk AppDynamics is 3.8%, down from 5.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Splunk AppDynamics	3.8%
New Relic	4.0%
SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor	1.3%
Other	90.9%

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

Featured Reviews

BasilJiji

System Engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

Real-time alerts have reduced server outage impact and support fast incident response

In the dashboard, if they could show a little more metrics regarding the application and related things, that would be how New Relic could be improved. Currently, there are things showing from the server level and application level, but it can be improved. That is what I felt. Regarding user interface, I do not feel much concern, but for some kind of issues when we are trying to get support from the New Relic team, their SLA seems to be long. They are taking seven to ten working days for resolving some kind of scenario or issue. That is a bit difficult for us. If they could improve the customer support by reducing their SLA within three to five days, if they could remediate everything, that will be so much helpful. When it comes to the customer support part, I felt they need to be a little more improved on that part. The support overall is good, but they can improve. That is the reason I have given it eight out of ten.

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NikhilKalwint

Technical Specialist at ServiceIO

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.

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Shamim Alsharif

Performance Test Engineer at TANIM CONSULTING, LLC

Real-time monitoring has improved our banking API performance and supports detailed business transaction analysis

The real-time monitoring is what we can see for anything that is needed in terms of CPU, memory, or the connections or the sessions related. It's real-time monitoring of performance of each of the components, which is what we need and use all the time. It's highly effective, I would say. Infrastructure visibility, transaction monitoring, to check the actual user experience in terms of the response time, MRT and all those things. We do the component monitoring like the API performance and the connections and all those things, but we also do the business process monitoring and business transaction monitoring.

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

"Constantly seeing the green status of all my servers makes me sleep well at night."

"It is stable and scalable."

"We like the performance of the product; it's very good, very reliable, and all features are capable of responding to our requirements."

"The service map feature is very useful."

"New Relic has positively impacted my organization by helping with our observability goals."

"It's a very stable product."

"The most valuable feature of the solution is its ability to execute queries and analyze the data."

"I don’t see us being able to operate without New Relic."

More New Relic pros

"The solution has good alerts. Notifications are sent via email to technicians. You can filter the kinds of alerts you want to receive as well. It's excellent."

"Hardware health: It allows for proactive monitoring of the hardware health and is a game changer."

"AppInsight. Provides a simple way to get very in-depth monitoring configured for our most popular applications. Exchange, SQL, and SharePoint."

"Features like monitoring and infrastructure dependency mapping are valuable to us."

"It is scalable."

"Manage Groups: The capability to group appropriate devices gives better visibility of sites, categories, or critical regions. The same can be used to represent a dashboard for higher management."

"The ROI for SolarWinds products is unmatched in the industry."

"The most beneficial aspect of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is its ability to monitor at the application level."

More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor pros

"It gives a complete, end-to-end visualization of an environment, making it easier to analyze any issue in production compared to other APM tools."

"Insights outside of the code we write."

"AppDynamics has a very broad range of supported technologies, and it's user-friendly."

"I definitely recommend it."

"When it comes to end-user monitoring (where you want to capture or trend back business transactions, or where you want to really view the performance of the tools), it's not just good in terms of managing your production system, but some of the developers use it to tackle performance issues and get ahead."

"I think the performance and interface are the most important features."

"AppDynamics provides us with detailed information about the performance of the underlying infrastructure, including servers, databases, and external services."

"AppDynamics is a good tool that offers excellent out-of-the-box dashboards and application topology."

More Splunk AppDynamics pros

Cons

"It gives you amazing statistics, but doesn’t give you enough information about what to do with the statistics."

"In Alert History, while you can see the trending in response time by Request Queuing, .NER CLR and Database, if you had the ability to see which transaction type was the slowest during the timeframe when the critical error occurred by displaying the info within the same “tool tip” hover window which currently gives me the time per request and number of transactions, i.e., if it had the additional correlation information of “StatusCode/403” which you can get from the Events Errors hover."

"We have some performance issues with the servers. Sometimes the server is consuming a lot of CPU or memory, and New Relic Insights fails."

"Email alert customization is limited; it cannot be tailored much, which makes the system more rigid than optimal."

"Email alert customization is limited."

"The solution is quite expensive."

"The logs in New Relic are not showing the full logs. When I go and check the logs, they are not complete."

"They need to improve the alerting and dashboarding as these are the key features in DevOps."

More New Relic cons

"Mapping interactions between systems."

"I would like to see support for non-Windows or non-Microsoft domains, especially Apache and other non-Windows servers."

"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."

"It needs time-based functions for monitoring. Some things need to be polled on a specific schedule or only during a specific window."

"The technical support team's response time could be improved."

"As per my view, Solarwinds should come up the same monitoring system for other certificate expiration alert apart from SSL."

"Some custom applications cannot be monitored, and a lot more applications need to be included."

"The major concern in the product revolves around application performance monitoring since end-to-end application monitoring is not possible with the tool."

More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor cons

"One area for improvement is the MST model. It would be more helpful if it could be offered as a managed service provider model with more multi-tenancy and features."

"One thing that can be improved is the license structure."

"The UI is clumsy and slow."

"Application Analytics' performance in pure and native cloud environments could be improved."

"Customer service is 3/10."

"I would like to be able to monitor both cloud an on-prem infrastructures, displayed in one dashboard."

"The pricing for AppDynamics Server Monitoring in Africa and the Middle East is too expensive, so it's very hard to sell it to customers."

"It's very complex regarding pricing, setup costs, and licensing of Splunk AppDynamics."

More Splunk AppDynamics cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is less expensive than AppNeta."

"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."

"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."

"We feel it's a little bit pricey."

"Pricing is better with New Relic APM than Dynatrace."

"The solution is cheap, but prices can go up when users grow."

"The pricing is fine."

"I think it's overpriced for the technical support that we get. We spent over 1,00,000 USD a year."

More New Relic pricing and cost advice

"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."

"The product is expensive."

"I think SolarWinds' pricing is very decent compared to other competitors in the market."

"When compared to other licensed models in the market, it stands out as one of the more cost-effective options."

"I would advise potential buyers to wait until the end of the quarter, end of year, or other time to place orders. There are actually great deals to be had at those times if your budget cycle can match up."

"The price is too high."

"When planning for the number of licenses to purchase, make sure you understand all of the elements within an application required to really understand performance well. In our case, we quickly came to the conclusion that an unlimited license for SAM was the way to go."

"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."

More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor pricing and cost advice

"I was not involved with the procurement of AppDynamic, but I believe it's expensive."

"Yearly payments have to be made toward the licensing costs of the solution. The solution has no additional costs apart from the licensing costs."

"I would say the solution is affordable because it is widely used across financial service sectors."

"We have a license-based solution. That means you need a license for each server you monitor."

"The cost is prohibitive."

"Because it is priced per JVM, the price can increase pretty fast, into the millions. We have had challenges because we had to justify the price to our clients, as well, when we are putting in certain tools."

"The price of AppDynamics could be reduced in my region."

"It's a very expensive product. Each of the licenses after this month for one server is around $9,000 or $10,000."

More Splunk AppDynamics pricing and cost advice

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885,667 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

12%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Construction Company

Educational Organization

12%

Financial Services Firm

Government

Healthcare Company

Financial Services Firm

24%

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	65
Midsize Enterprise	50
Large Enterprise	77

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	17
Midsize Enterprise	8
Large Enterprise	21

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	57
Midsize Enterprise	37
Large Enterprise	200

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,...

See all answers

What do you like most about New Relic Insights?

The product's initial setup phase was very easy.

See all answers

What needs improvement with New Relic Insights?

I have noticed discrepancies between New Relic's documentation and Terraform resources. For example, there have been ...

See all answers

What do you like most about SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor?

Identifying the problem statement is easy.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor?

The initial cost is quite high, but the renewal cost is reasonable.

See all answers

What needs improvement with SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor?

There is definitely room for improvement besides simplifying its setup. As a non-technical person, I believe the dash...

See all answers

What do you like most about AppDynamics?

The solution saves time and cost.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for AppDynamics?

I would rate the pricing an eight out of ten. The solution is highly expensive. Our company pays for the solution on ...

See all answers

What needs improvement with AppDynamics?

The solution is available at an inflated cost.

See all answers

Comparisons

Dynatrace vs New Relic

Compared 8% of the time

Datadog vs New Relic

Compared 7% of the time

Azure Monitor vs New Relic

Compared 2% of the time

WhatsUp Gold vs New Relic

Compared 2% of the time

Elastic Observability vs New Relic

Compared 2% of the time

More New Relic Competitors

Azure Monitor vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

Compared 8% of the time

Dynatrace vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

Compared 7% of the time

Icinga vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

Compared 5% of the time

Opsview vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

Compared 4% of the time

eG Enterprise vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

Compared 4% of the time

More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor Competitors

Dynatrace vs Splunk AppDynamics

Compared 8% of the time

Datadog vs Splunk AppDynamics

Compared 6% of the time

Splunk Enterprise Security vs Splunk AppDynamics

Compared 4% of the time

PRTG Network Monitor vs Splunk AppDynamics

Compared 3% of the time

Nagios XI vs Splunk AppDynamics

Compared 2% of the time

More Splunk AppDynamics Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

New Relic

March 2026

Download New Relic product report

Buyer's Guide

SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

March 2026

SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor report

Download SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor product report

Buyer's Guide

Splunk AppDynamics

March 2026

Download Splunk AppDynamics product report

Also Known As

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

SolarWinds SAM

No data available

Overview

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.

New Relic

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM) delivers powerful application and server monitoring capabilities for IT pros, enabling them to diagnose and troubleshoot performance issues faster. Do not let slow applications and downtime impact your end-users and business services. Pinpoint the root cause of application issues across various layers of the IT stack. SolarWinds SAM is affordable and easy to deploy, use, and customize. You can automatically discover your system's environment and start monitoring in about an hour. No professional services or consultation needed.

SolarWinds

Splunk AppDynamics is a comprehensive performance monitoring tool providing end-to-end transaction tracking, real-time monitoring, and a user-friendly interface. With AI-powered features, it enhances operational efficiency and resilience by offering insights into user interactions and infrastructure issues.

Splunk AppDynamics excels in monitoring applications and infrastructure performance, offering extensive support across environments like AWS and cloud. It aids in application performance monitoring, end-user experience, database analysis, and proactive incident detection. Supporting Java, .NET, and other technologies, it provides real-time insights into application health, resource utilization, and transaction tracking, ensuring reliable user experiences. Challenges remain in UI complexity, agent-based architecture, integration with diverse environments, and documentation clarity. Its licensing model is costly, and customer support may be slow. Performance concerns exist in historical data granularity and network visibility.

What features make Splunk AppDynamics stand out?

End-to-End Transaction Tracking: Monitors entire user transactions for comprehensive visibility.
Real-Time Monitoring: Provides instant insights into system performance.
AI-Powered Anomaly Detection: Identifies anomalies with advanced machine learning techniques.
Code-Level Troubleshooting: Diagnoses issues at the code level for precise fixes.
Business Transaction Visibility: Offers detailed views into transaction flow across all system layers.

What benefits and ROI can users expect from Splunk AppDynamics?

Improved Application Performance: Enhances system efficiency and reliability.
Operational Efficiency: Streamlines monitoring and issue resolution processes.
Enhanced Business Resilience: Strengthens the ability to adapt to performance challenges.
Seamless User Experiences: Ensures uninterrupted service and user satisfaction.

Organizations in industries like finance and healthcare implement Splunk AppDynamics to monitor critical applications and infrastructure. Its capabilities in transaction tracking and AI-driven insights are crucial for maintaining system reliability, supporting technologies such as Java and .NET, and ensuring optimal resource utilization.

Splunk

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

Cisco, Sony, Nasdaq, Reserve Bank of New Zealand, Edmunds.com, Puma, Fox News, DirecTV, Pizza Hut, T-Systems, Cornell University, OpenTable, BITMARCK, Green Mountain Power, Care.com, Overstock, Paddy Power, eHarmony, Kraft, The Motley Fool, The Container Store, and more See more customers

Buyer's Guide

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

March 2026

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