New Relic and CircleCI 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 CircleCI (cloud-native continuous integration and delivery platform, founded 2011) leans toward Developers, DevOps, and Platform Engineers. Both cover 6 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, Real User Monitoring, API & Browser Testing, and AI-Powered, among others. Choose New Relic if those matter to your workflow; CircleCI (Free tier; paid plans from $15/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
Cloud-native continuous integration and delivery platform
Pricing: Free tier; paid plans from $15/mo
Founded: 2011
Best for: Developers, DevOps, Platform Engineers
9 of 18 capabilities separate these two. Those come first.
| Feature | New Relic | CircleCI |
|---|---|---|
| Where they differ (9) | ||
| Synthetic Monitoring | New Relic: yes | CircleCI: no |
| Real User Monitoring | New Relic: yes | CircleCI: no |
| API & Browser Testing | New Relic: yes | CircleCI: no |
| AI-Powered | New Relic: yes | CircleCI: no |
| Uptime Monitoring | New Relic: yes | CircleCI: no |
| Multi-Location Checks | New Relic: yes | CircleCI: no |
| SSL Monitoring | New Relic: yes | CircleCI: no |
| On-Premise / Self-Host | New Relic: no | CircleCI: yes |
| Incident Management | New Relic: yes | CircleCI: no |
| Both tools have (6) | ||
| Alerting | New Relic: yes | CircleCI: yes |
| Slack Integration | New Relic: yes | CircleCI: yes |
| CI/CD Integration | New Relic: yes | CircleCI: yes |
| Free Tier | New Relic: yes | CircleCI: yes |
| API Access | New Relic: yes | CircleCI: yes |
| Dashboards | New Relic: yes | CircleCI: yes |
| Neither tool has (3) | ||
| Self-Healing Tests | New Relic: no | CircleCI: no |
| Status Page | New Relic: no | CircleCI: no |
| Open Source | New Relic: no | CircleCI: no |
Pros
Cons
Pros
Cons
New Relic is observability platform for every engineer, while CircleCI is cloud-native continuous integration and delivery platform. New Relic adds Synthetic Monitoring, Real User Monitoring, and API & Browser Testing on top of the shared feature set. CircleCI 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). CircleCI pricing: Free tier; paid plans from $15/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 CircleCI targets Developers, DevOps, and Platform Engineers. If your team matches the former profile, New Relic is usually the closer fit.
No. It does a different job. CI platforms test your code at deploy time. ObserveOne keeps testing production between deploys: the same critical journeys, on a schedule, with alerting when they break.
CI platforms test your code at deploy time. ObserveOne keeps testing production between deploys: the same critical journeys, on a schedule, with alerting when they break. The free tier covers enough to try it on one critical journey.
Each tool has its own alternatives page too, not just this matchup.