New Relic Alternatives: Five Options Compared by Pricing Model
Prices and facts checked on vendor pages on Nov 8, 2026.
New Relic pricing has two parts: a free tier with 100 GB of ingest, then charges for data and for people. That model suits some teams well and can surprise others when headcount grows. This page compares five alternatives by how each one charges, so you can see which model fits how your team works. Sazabi is one of the five and wrote this page. We say where the others are the better pick.
What New Relic Charges, For Reference
New Relic prices data and users separately. Data is 100 GB free each month, then $0.40 per GB, or $0.60 per GB with the Data Plus option. Users come in three types. Basic users are free. Core users are $49 per user. Full platform users get one free user on the Free edition, then $10 for the first user and $99 for each additional user on Standard (up to five), or $349 per user on Pro with annual commitments ($418.80 on monthly pay as you go). Pro and Enterprise also list a consumption option with no user licenses. The page lists 50+ capabilities, 800+ integrations, and unlimited hosts at no additional cost. For the full breakdown, see New Relic Pricing Explained and Sazabi vs New Relic.
A quick example, using only the list prices above: a Standard team with five full platform users and 300 GB of original data ingest in a month pays $10 plus four times $99 for users ($406), plus 200 billable GB at $0.40 ($80). That is $486 per month before any core users, and it assumes monthly billing.
Five New Relic Alternatives At A Glance
How To Choose
- How many people need full access? If the answer is more than five, compare per-user fees against flat or usage-based models first.
- Do you pay for hosts or for data? Host pricing is predictable for a fixed fleet but moves with autoscaling. Data pricing moves with chattiness.
- Are traces or logs the core of your workflow? Honeycomb centers on events and traces. Sazabi centers on logs.
- Do you need to run it yourself? Elastic offers self-managed, and Grafana lists a bring-your-own-cloud option at the Enterprise tier.
Datadog
Datadog bills by product, mostly by host. On its list price page (US sites, annual billing), Infrastructure Pro is $15 per infra host per month ($18 month-to-month), Infrastructure Enterprise is $23 ($27), and APM is $31 per APM host per month ($36). Log ingestion is $0.10 per GB, and custom metrics are $5 per 100 per month. See the Datadog integration and the Alternatives to Datadog page for more.
Pick it when you want many products from one vendor and your fleet size is steady. Skip it when you want one bill with few moving parts, since each product has its own meter.
Grafana Cloud
Grafana Cloud prices metrics by active series. The calculator on its pricing page shows 10,000 series free, then $6.50 per 1,000 series for the next tier, falling to $5.90 and $5.50 at higher volumes. Enterprise lists prices as low as $3 per 1,000 series with a $25,000 annual minimum. Pro is $19 per month with 13-month metrics retention, and Free keeps data for 14 days. The Enterprise tier lists public cloud, federal cloud, and bring-your-own-cloud deployments. Learn more on the Grafana integration page.
Pick it when you already use Grafana or Prometheus and want a managed version. Skip it when you want one flat rate, because metrics, logs, and traces each have their own pricing.
Honeycomb
Honeycomb prices on event volume, not on users. Free covers up to 20M events and 100M metrics data points per month. Pro starts at $150 per month for 50M events (up to 750M). The page lists unlimited seats, unlimited querying, and distributed tracing on every plan, with service-level objectives from Pro. Enterprise plans start with a base allowance of 10 billion events per year. The Honeycomb integration shows how it connects, and Sazabi vs Honeycomb compares the products.
Pick it when your team debugs production through traces and wants everyone to have a seat. Skip it when your data is mostly plain logs, since the pricing page is organized around events.
Elastic
Elastic Observability Serverless charges per GB ingested and per GB retained. The recommended tier lists ingest as low as $0.09 per GB for logs and traces and $0.023 for metrics, retention as low as $0.019 per GB per month for logs and traces, and egress at $0.05 per GB after 50 GB free. A lower-priced tier lists ingest as low as $0.07 and retention as low as $0.017. Support beyond the Standard level is a percentage of consumption: 5% for Gold, 10% for Platinum, and 15% for Enterprise. Elastic also offers hosted and self-managed deployments. See Sazabi vs Elastic and the Elastic Cloud integration.
Pick it when you want to choose between serverless, hosted, and self-managed. Skip it when you want the least setup, since Elastic gives you many knobs.
Sazabi
Compared with New Relic, the main difference is what you pay for and what you get back. Sazabi has no user licenses. Plans cap members at 2 on Hobby, 15 on Startup, and 45 on Growth, and each plan includes 200 GB of logs ingested and 50 GB scanned per 30-day cycle. Beyond that, ingest and scans are $0.10 per GB. Hobby is $50, Startup is $200, and Growth is $1,000, with 7, 30, and 90 days of retention. There is no yearly billing.
Where New Relic gives you dashboards and alert conditions to build, Sazabi investigates your logs and opens an issue when it finds a problem, with what happened and the evidence attached. Issues route to Slack, Linear, and other tools through delivery rules, and the root cause can be handed to your coding agent through MCP, CLI, or API. Sazabi is AI-native observability and security, and it also scans connected repositories for vulnerabilities.
Pick it when your team lives in logs and wants fewer rules to maintain. Skip it when you depend on New Relic APM, browser monitoring, or infrastructure views, because Sazabi's New Relic source does not accept New Relic metrics, events, traces, or browser data. See Sazabi pricing.
Try An Alternative Without Dropping New Relic
For logs, Sazabi has a New Relic source. The infrastructure agent (version 1.76.2 or later), the newrelic-logging Helm chart, and Fluent Bit with the newrelic output plugin each accept a changed logs endpoint, and Sazabi ignores the license key. One caution from the docs: changing that endpoint sends logs to Sazabi instead of New Relic, not in addition to it. For a side-by-side trial, use a test host or a single namespace first.
APM agents cannot send their logs to this source directly. Turn on local log decorating so log lines carry trace and span IDs, then forward the log files through the infrastructure agent. If you run an APM agent and want to keep it for traces, send only logs through OpenTelemetry using the logs-only setup Sazabi documents.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why do teams leave New Relic?
The most common reason is user pricing. New Relic charges for core and full platform users on top of data ingest, so costs rise with the number of people who need full access. Others want a different mix of products or a simpler bill.
Does New Relic charge per user?
Yes, on its user-based editions. Basic users are free, core users are $49 per user, and full platform users range from one free user on Free to $349 per user on Pro with annual commitments. Pro and Enterprise also list a consumption option with no user licenses.
Can I send New Relic logs to Sazabi?
Yes, for logs. The New Relic infrastructure agent, the Kubernetes logging chart, or the Fluent Bit plugin can point at a Sazabi endpoint. Changing that endpoint sends logs to Sazabi instead of New Relic. Metrics, events, traces, and browser data are not supported.
Which New Relic alternative has no per-user fees?
Honeycomb lists unlimited seats on its pricing page. Sazabi has no per-user fee, but each plan caps the number of members at 2, 15, or 45. Check each vendor for per-seat charges on specific products.
Sources
- New Relic editions, free ingest, per-GB rates, Data Plus, user types and user prices, compute pricing (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Datadog infrastructure and APM host prices, log ingestion price, annual and month-to-month columns (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Grafana Cloud metrics tiers, Free and Pro plans, retention, Enterprise commit and BYOC (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Honeycomb Free and Pro event volumes, Pro starting price, unlimited seats, Enterprise allowance (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Elastic Observability Serverless ingest, retention and egress rates, support percentages (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Elastic hosted, serverless and self-managed deployment options (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Sazabi plans, member limits, included allowances, per-unit rates, retention (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- New Relic agents forwarding logs to Sazabi, endpoint behavior, unsupported New Relic data (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Keeping an APM agent for traces while sending logs through OpenTelemetry (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Issues compared with alerts and monitors, severity, delivery rules (accessed Nov 8, 2026)