New Relic and Sentry 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 Sentry (application error monitoring and performance management, founded 2012) leans toward Developers, Frontend Teams, and Backend Engineers. Both cover 9 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
Application error monitoring and performance management
Pricing: Developer (Free - 5k errors), Team from ~$26/mo, Business from ~$80/mo
Founded: 2012
Best for: Developers, Frontend Teams, Backend Engineers
| Feature | New Relic | Sentry |
|---|---|---|
| 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, API & Browser Testing, Multi-Location Checks, and SSL Monitoring, among others. Choose New Relic if those matter to your workflow; Sentry (Developer (Free - 5k errors), Team from ~$26/mo, Business from ~$80/mo) remains a solid option if On-Premise / Self-Host is what you need.
New Relic is observability platform for every engineer, while Sentry is application error monitoring and performance management. New Relic adds Synthetic Monitoring, API & Browser Testing, and Multi-Location Checks on top of the shared feature set. Sentry 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). Sentry pricing: Developer (Free - 5k errors), Team from ~$26/mo, Business from ~$80/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 Sentry targets Developers, Frontend Teams, 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.