New Relic and Bugsnag are often evaluated together by teams building out their reliability stack. New Relic (observability platform for every engineer, founded 2008) is typically a fit for Developers, DevOps Teams, and SREs, while Bugsnag (error monitoring with stability scoring, built mainly around mobile and web apps, founded 2013) leans toward Mobile Engineers, Frontend Teams, and Release Managers. Both cover 8 of the same core capabilities, so the decision usually comes down to where they diverge.
On capability breadth, New Relic pulls ahead here: it uniquely offers Synthetic Monitoring, API & Browser Testing, Uptime Monitoring, and Multi-Location Checks, among others. Choose New Relic if those matter to your workflow; Bugsnag (Free tier (7,500 events/mo), Team from ~$22/mo) remains a solid option if On-Premise / Self-Host is what you need.
Observability platform for every engineer
Pricing: Usage-based limits: Free (500 checks/mo), Standard (10k checks), Pro (1M checks)
Founded: 2008
Best for: Developers, DevOps Teams, SREs
Error monitoring with stability scoring, built mainly around mobile and web apps
Pricing: Free tier (7,500 events/mo), Team from ~$22/mo
Founded: 2013
Best for: Mobile Engineers, Frontend Teams, Release Managers
7 of 18 capabilities separate these two. Those come first.
| Feature | New Relic | Bugsnag |
|---|---|---|
| Where they differ (7) | ||
| Synthetic Monitoring | New Relic: yes | Bugsnag: no |
| API & Browser Testing | New Relic: yes | Bugsnag: no |
| Uptime Monitoring | New Relic: yes | Bugsnag: no |
| Multi-Location Checks | New Relic: yes | Bugsnag: no |
| SSL Monitoring | New Relic: yes | Bugsnag: no |
| On-Premise / Self-Host | New Relic: no | Bugsnag: yes |
| Incident Management | New Relic: yes | Bugsnag: no |
| Both tools have (8) | ||
| Real User Monitoring | New Relic: yes | Bugsnag: yes |
| AI-Powered | New Relic: yes | Bugsnag: yes |
| Alerting | New Relic: yes | Bugsnag: yes |
| Slack Integration | New Relic: yes | Bugsnag: yes |
| CI/CD Integration | New Relic: yes | Bugsnag: yes |
| Free Tier | New Relic: yes | Bugsnag: yes |
| API Access | New Relic: yes | Bugsnag: yes |
| Dashboards | New Relic: yes | Bugsnag: yes |
| Neither tool has (3) | ||
| Self-Healing Tests | New Relic: no | Bugsnag: no |
| Status Page | New Relic: no | Bugsnag: no |
| Open Source | New Relic: no | Bugsnag: no |
Pros
Cons
Pros
Cons
New Relic is observability platform for every engineer, while Bugsnag is error monitoring with stability scoring, built mainly around mobile and web apps. New Relic adds Synthetic Monitoring, API & Browser Testing, and Uptime Monitoring on top of the shared feature set. Bugsnag brings On-Premise / Self-Host that New Relic does not.
New Relic pricing: Usage-based limits: Free (500 checks/mo), Standard (10k checks), Pro (1M checks). Bugsnag pricing: Free tier (7,500 events/mo), Team from ~$22/mo. Evaluate against your check volume and team size; entry pricing rarely reflects total cost at scale.
New Relic is designed with Developers, DevOps Teams, and SREs in mind, whereas Bugsnag targets Mobile Engineers, Frontend Teams, and Release Managers. If your team matches the former profile, New Relic is usually the closer fit.
No. It does a different job. Error trackers tell you an exception fired. They can't see the failures that never throw: a checkout that silently breaks, an expired SSL certificate, a page that returns 200 and renders blank. ObserveOne monitors those user-facing journeys in production; teams run it alongside an error tracker, not instead of one.
Error trackers tell you an exception fired. They can't see the failures that never throw: a checkout that silently breaks, an expired SSL certificate, a page that returns 200 and renders blank. ObserveOne monitors those user-facing journeys in production; teams run it alongside an error tracker, not instead of one. The free tier covers enough to try it on one critical journey.
Each tool has its own alternatives page too, not just this matchup.