New Relic and Jenkins 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 Jenkins (self-hosted open-source automation server for building and deploying any kind of project, founded 2011) leans toward DevOps Engineers, Platform Teams, and Enterprise IT. 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; Jenkins (Free open-source; hardware/ops cost only) remains a solid option if Open Source and 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
Self-hosted open-source automation server for building and deploying any kind of project
Pricing: Free open-source; hardware/ops cost only
Founded: 2011
Best for: DevOps Engineers, Platform Teams, Enterprise IT
10 of 18 capabilities separate these two. Those come first.
| Feature | New Relic | Jenkins |
|---|---|---|
| Where they differ (10) | ||
| Synthetic Monitoring | New Relic: yes | Jenkins: no |
| Real User Monitoring | New Relic: yes | Jenkins: no |
| API & Browser Testing | New Relic: yes | Jenkins: no |
| AI-Powered | New Relic: yes | Jenkins: no |
| Uptime Monitoring | New Relic: yes | Jenkins: no |
| Multi-Location Checks | New Relic: yes | Jenkins: no |
| SSL Monitoring | New Relic: yes | Jenkins: no |
| Open Source | New Relic: no | Jenkins: yes |
| On-Premise / Self-Host | New Relic: no | Jenkins: yes |
| Incident Management | New Relic: yes | Jenkins: no |
| Both tools have (6) | ||
| Alerting | New Relic: yes | Jenkins: yes |
| Slack Integration | New Relic: yes | Jenkins: yes |
| CI/CD Integration | New Relic: yes | Jenkins: yes |
| Free Tier | New Relic: yes | Jenkins: yes |
| API Access | New Relic: yes | Jenkins: yes |
| Dashboards | New Relic: yes | Jenkins: yes |
| Neither tool has (2) | ||
| Self-Healing Tests | New Relic: no | Jenkins: no |
| Status Page | New Relic: no | Jenkins: no |
Pros
Cons
Pros
Cons
New Relic is observability platform for every engineer, while Jenkins is self-hosted open-source automation server for building and deploying any kind of project. New Relic adds Synthetic Monitoring, Real User Monitoring, and API & Browser Testing on top of the shared feature set. Jenkins brings Open Source and 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). Jenkins pricing: Free open-source; hardware/ops cost only. 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 Jenkins targets DevOps Engineers, Platform Teams, and Enterprise IT. 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.