New Relic and Rollbar 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 Rollbar (error tracking with automated grouping and deploy-aware release tracking, founded 2012) leans toward Developers, SREs, and Backend Engineers. Both cover 7 of the same core capabilities, so the decision usually comes down to where they diverge.
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 tracking with automated grouping and deploy-aware release tracking
Pricing: Free (5,000 events/mo), Essentials from $9/mo
Founded: 2012
Best for: Developers, SREs, Backend Engineers
| Feature | New Relic | Rollbar |
|---|---|---|
| Synthetic Monitoring | ||
| Real User Monitoring | ||
| API & Browser Testing | ||
| Self-Healing Tests | ||
| AI-Powered | ||
| Uptime Monitoring | ||
| Alerting | ||
| Slack Integration | ||
| CI/CD Integration | ||
| Multi-Location Checks | ||
| SSL Monitoring | ||
| Status Page | ||
| Open Source | ||
| On-Premise / Self-Host | ||
| Free Tier | ||
| API Access | ||
| Dashboards | ||
| Incident Management |
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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; Rollbar (Free (5,000 events/mo), Essentials from $9/mo) remains a solid option if you want a simpler, focused tool.
New Relic is observability platform for every engineer, while Rollbar is error tracking with automated grouping and deploy-aware release tracking. New Relic adds Synthetic Monitoring, Real User Monitoring, and API & Browser Testing on top of the shared feature set.
New Relic pricing: Usage-based limits: Free (500 checks/mo), Standard (10k checks), Pro (1M checks). Rollbar pricing: Free (5,000 events/mo), Essentials from $9/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 Rollbar targets Developers, SREs, and Backend Engineers. 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.