New Relic and PagerDuty 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 PagerDuty (digital operations management and incident response, founded 2009) leans toward DevOps Teams, SREs, and On-call Engineers. 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, Real User Monitoring, API & Browser Testing, and Uptime Monitoring, among others. Choose New Relic if those matter to your workflow; PagerDuty (Free (5 users), Pro $21/user/mo, Business $41/user/mo (+ Add-ons)) remains a solid option if Status Page 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
Digital operations management and incident response
Pricing: Free (5 users), Pro $21/user/mo, Business $41/user/mo (+ Add-ons)
Founded: 2009
Best for: DevOps Teams, SREs, On-call Engineers
7 of 18 capabilities separate these two. Those come first.
| Feature | New Relic | PagerDuty |
|---|---|---|
| Where they differ (7) | ||
| Synthetic Monitoring | New Relic: yes | PagerDuty: no |
| Real User Monitoring | New Relic: yes | PagerDuty: no |
| API & Browser Testing | New Relic: yes | PagerDuty: no |
| Uptime Monitoring | New Relic: yes | PagerDuty: no |
| Multi-Location Checks | New Relic: yes | PagerDuty: no |
| SSL Monitoring | New Relic: yes | PagerDuty: no |
| Status Page | New Relic: no | PagerDuty: yes |
| Both tools have (8) | ||
| AI-Powered | New Relic: yes | PagerDuty: yes |
| Alerting | New Relic: yes | PagerDuty: yes |
| Slack Integration | New Relic: yes | PagerDuty: yes |
| CI/CD Integration | New Relic: yes | PagerDuty: yes |
| Free Tier | New Relic: yes | PagerDuty: yes |
| API Access | New Relic: yes | PagerDuty: yes |
| Dashboards | New Relic: yes | PagerDuty: yes |
| Incident Management | New Relic: yes | PagerDuty: yes |
| Neither tool has (3) | ||
| Self-Healing Tests | New Relic: no | PagerDuty: no |
| Open Source | New Relic: no | PagerDuty: no |
| On-Premise / Self-Host | New Relic: no | PagerDuty: no |
Pros
Cons
Pros
Cons
New Relic is observability platform for every engineer, while PagerDuty is digital operations management and incident response. New Relic adds Synthetic Monitoring, Real User Monitoring, and API & Browser Testing on top of the shared feature set. PagerDuty brings Status Page that New Relic does not.
New Relic pricing: Usage-based limits: Free (500 checks/mo), Standard (10k checks), Pro (1M checks). PagerDuty pricing: Free (5 users), Pro $21/user/mo, Business $41/user/mo (+ Add-ons). 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 PagerDuty targets DevOps Teams, SREs, and On-call Engineers. If your team matches the former profile, New Relic is usually the closer fit.
No. It does a different job. On-call and status tools decide who gets paged and what customers see, but they need a detection layer feeding them. ObserveOne is that layer: scheduled synthetic checks on your critical journeys that catch the outage and hand it to your incident process.
On-call and status tools decide who gets paged and what customers see, but they need a detection layer feeding them. ObserveOne is that layer: scheduled synthetic checks on your critical journeys that catch the outage and hand it to your incident process. The free tier covers enough to try it on one critical journey.
Each tool has its own alternatives page too, not just this matchup.