New Relic makes sense when you run a full-stack platform and want traces, infrastructure metrics, logs, and synthetic checks under one bill. It stops making sense the moment your actual problem is smaller than that. Teams that just want to know whether the login page or the checkout flow is broken often end up paying full-platform-user prices for APM they never open. Below is what New Relic actually charges today, what moving your Synthetics monitors out involves, and where it still beats everything on this list.
New Relic moved off the old per-check pricing years ago. What you pay now is data ingest plus per-seat user pricing, and synthetic monitor results count toward that ingest. Pulled from newrelic.com/pricing on August 17, 2026:
| Plan | Price | Detail |
|---|---|---|
| Free | $0/mo | 100 GB of data ingest included, one free full-platform user, unlimited basic view-only users. |
| Standard | $10 for the first full-platform user, $99 for each additional (up to 5) | Core users are $49/mo each. Data beyond the free 100 GB is $0.40/GB. Built for small teams getting started, capped at 5 full-platform users. |
| Pro | $349/user/mo billed annually, or $418.80/user/mo pay as you go | Unlimited full-platform users, no seat cap. Data Plus (adds FedRAMP Moderate and HIPAA eligibility) runs $0.60/GB instead of $0.40. |
| Enterprise | Contact sales | Priority ticket routing and a 1-hour critical support response SLA on top of everything in Pro. |
A small team of three full-platform users on Standard, staying inside the free 100 GB, works out to $10 + $99 + $99 = $208/mo before a single trace or log line beyond that allowance. Add real APM data from a handful of services and the $0.40/GB overage adds up fast, since a chatty service can push several GB a day on its own.
Source: newrelic.com/pricing, fetched August 17, 2026.
New Relic Synthetics has three monitor types, and each one migrates differently. Which one you built determines how much work this actually is.
These just check that a URL loads. There is nothing to export because there is nothing but the URL. Paste it into an ObserveOne URL monitor and it is done.
Built by clicking through prebuilt actions in New Relic's UI. There is no underlying script to pull out, so there is nothing to port. Rebuild the flow by hand in ObserveOne's editor, or point Autopilot at the page and let it generate the Playwright suite, then check it against what the old monitor actually clicked.
This is where the real work is. New Relic's scripting API is Selenium's WebDriver ($webDriver.get(), .findElement(), and so on), not Playwright. The syntax and the waiting behavior are different enough that a New Relic script will not run if you paste it into a Playwright test. Someone has to read the old script and re-author it, either directly or by describing the flow to Autopilot and diffing the result against the original steps.
Ranked by how closely each one replaces New Relic. Every row links to a full side-by-side breakdown.
| Tool | Best for | Pricing | Comparison |
|---|---|---|---|
1 ObserveOneAI-powered synthetic monitoring and self-healing test automation | AI-First QA Teams | Free tier available, paid plans from $6/mo | vs New Relic |
2 HoneycombObservability platform built around distributed tracing and high-cardinality event data | SRE Teams | Free tier up to 20M events/mo, Pro from $130 per 100M events/mo | vs New Relic |
3 SentryApplication error monitoring and performance management | Developers | Developer (Free - 5k errors), Team from ~$26/mo, Business from ~$80/mo | vs New Relic |
4 PingdomWebsite performance and uptime monitoring | Web Developers | Synthetic from ~$10/mo, RUM from ~$10/mo (100k pageviews) | vs New Relic |
5 GrafanaOpen-source observability and data visualization | Engineers | Open source free, Cloud from $0 (scalable usage-based) | vs New Relic |
6 UptimeRobotFree uptime monitoring for websites | Freelancers | Free (non-commercial, 50 monitors), Solo from $9/mo, Team from $38/mo | vs New Relic |
7 PrometheusOpen-source metrics monitoring and alerting toolkit | DevOps | Free and open source | vs New Relic |
8 Better StackUptime monitoring, incident management and status pages | DevOps Teams | Free tier, paid from $29/mo | vs New Relic |
9 StatusCakeWebsite uptime, performance and SSL monitoring | Small Businesses | Free tier, Superior $24.99/mo, Business $66.66/mo | vs New Relic |
10 Site24x7All-in-one monitoring for websites, servers and apps | IT Operations | Free tier, paid from $9/mo | vs New Relic |
None of this makes New Relic the wrong pick for every team. If you actually run backend services and need traces, infrastructure metrics, and log aggregation sitting next to your synthetic checks, New Relic's APM is mature and its integration catalog (780+ per its own pricing page) covers ground ObserveOne does not touch. ObserveOne has no real user monitoring yet, no infrastructure or log monitoring at all, and is a newer company (founded 2024, against New Relic's 2008), so both the integration list and the community answers you find for edge cases are thinner. If synthetic monitoring is one line on a longer observability checklist, paying for everything under one bill can still be the cheaper decision once you count the cost of stitching three vendors together yourself. If synthetic checks and test automation are the actual job, paying full-platform-user prices for APM you will not open is the expensive way to get there.
Usually not on its own. New Relic prices around full-platform observability (APM, infrastructure, logs, and synthetics together), so paying $10 to $99 per user a month to run a handful of uptime checks is buying a lot of product you will not use. It is worth it once you are already paying for the APM and infrastructure side and synthetics rides along for free ingest.
Depends on the monitor type. Page load monitors are just a URL, copy it over. Codeless step monitors have no script to export, so you rebuild the flow in ObserveOne's editor or with Autopilot. Scripted browser monitors use New Relic's Selenium-based WebDriver API, which does not translate directly to Playwright, so those need a manual rewrite or an Autopilot regeneration checked against the original script.
Yes, and it is the safer way to do this. Keep New Relic's monitors live while the equivalent ObserveOne checks run for a week or two, then compare the pass and fail history before turning the old ones off.
On the Standard plan, three full-platform users runs $10 for the first seat plus $99 for each of the next two, $208/mo, as long as you stay inside the free 100 GB of data ingest. Add APM traces or log volume from even a few services and the $0.40/GB overage on top of that can double the bill within a couple of months.
If the second paragraph above describes your team, moving the checks over is mechanical work, not a hard decision. Start with whichever monitor type you have the fewest of and confirm it behaves the same before touching the rest.
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