New Relic vs AppDynamics: Data and User Pricing, Business Transactions and Deployment
Prices and facts checked on vendor pages on Nov 8, 2026.
New Relic and Splunk AppDynamics both monitor application performance, but they bill and deploy differently. New Relic is a hosted service that charges for data and for the engineers who sign in. AppDynamics is organized around business transactions, priced per host in editions, and can run as SaaS or on your own hardware. If you need to keep the monitoring backend on your own infrastructure, AppDynamics documents a route for it. If you want to sign up and try it today, New Relic is the quicker start.
The Short Answer
Choose New Relic when you want to start free, need logs and traces in one data store, or have more hosts than engineers. Choose AppDynamics when you need an on-premises Controller, want monitoring organized around business transactions, or already buy Splunk and want logs to link out to it. Both take OpenTelemetry, though AppDynamics documents OpenTelemetry ingest for trace data.
New Relic vs AppDynamics at a Glance
How New Relic Charges
List prices below were checked on November 8, 2026. New Relic gives 100 GB of ingest free each month, then bills $0.40 per GB, or $0.60 with the Data Plus option. User prices depend on edition and type: basic users cost nothing, core users $49, and full platform users $10 for the first and $99 each after that on Standard (five maximum) or $349 on Pro with an annual commitment. A free account includes one full platform user. There is no charge per host or container.
How AppDynamics Charges
Splunk's pricing page lists three Splunk AppDynamics editions, all billed annually. Infrastructure is $6 per vCPU per month. Premium is $33 per host per month and adds APM, Database Monitoring, and Log Observability. Enterprise is $50 per host per month and adds Transaction Analytics. Add-ons run $13.75 per CPU core per month for Application Security, $12 per test location per month for Browser Synthetics, and $0.06 per 1,000 tokens per month for Real User Monitoring. Every edition is "get a quote," so treat these as starting points. The page counts hosts, while the add-ons count CPU cores, so ask how your hosts will be sized. It does not state log volume limits.
Worked example, with the assumption that ten application hosts fall under Premium or Enterprise. Premium is 10 x $33 = $330 a month and Enterprise is 10 x $50 = $500, before add-ons and log storage. For New Relic, five full platform users on Pro with 300 GB of telemetry come to 5 x $349 = $1,745 plus (300 - 100) x $0.40 = $80, or $1,825. On Standard the same load is $10 + 4 x $99 = $406 plus $80, or $486. With ten hosts, the AppDynamics list price is much lower. As host count rises relative to headcount, that flips.
Business Transactions vs a Platform of Entities
AppDynamics frames performance around business transactions: its agents discover the entry points of a request, such as a login or a checkout, treat similar requests as one transaction, and trace the path to databases and other tiers. That lets you ask whether users can check out rather than whether a service is up. Its Anomaly Detection and Automated Root Cause Analysis then work on those transaction anomalies.
New Relic organizes telemetry by entity and lets you query all of it with NRQL, so you can build the same view yourself. The tradeoff is that you design the view, while AppDynamics ships a model for it.
Logs, Deployment and OpenTelemetry
New Relic stores logs itself: 30 days by default, extendable to seven years with live archives billed for storage and queries separately. AppDynamics lists Log Observability in Premium and Enterprise, and documents Log Observer Connect, which links the Controller to logs held in Splunk Platform through deep links, so teams already on Splunk keep one log store.
On deployment, the AppDynamics docs cover SaaS and an On-Premises route in which you prepare a host and install the Controller. New Relic documents no self-hosted option. For OpenTelemetry, New Relic's OTLP endpoint is the front door. AppDynamics runs an OpenTelemetry-compatible backend that ingests trace data, so metrics and logs would need other routes.
When to Pick New Relic
- Your cost driver is host sprawl, and your engineering team is small.
- You want a free tier and a credit-card start.
- You want logs, traces and metrics queried in one language.
- You use Slack for incident response and want an assistant there.
When to Pick AppDynamics
- You need the Controller on your own infrastructure.
- Your team thinks in terms of business transactions and tiers.
- You already run Splunk and want logs reachable from the Controller.
- You have many engineers and relatively few application hosts.
Where Sazabi Fits
Sazabi is AI-native observability and security that can sit beside New Relic or AppDynamics instead of replacing them. If logs already pass through an OpenTelemetry Collector, add Sazabi as another exporter. Its agent investigates in Slack and opens issues, so your APM tool can keep its dashboards.
Sazabi ingests OpenTelemetry metrics (Prometheus metrics through an OpenTelemetry Collector) and OTLP traces through the same intake as your logs. It stores each metric data point and each span as a log record that its agent queries alongside your logs, so there is no separate metrics store to run.
Read Sazabi vs New Relic and Sazabi vs AppDynamics, the neighboring New Relic vs Dynatrace comparison, or the Sazabi pricing page.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is AppDynamics owned by Cisco or Splunk?
The product is now named Splunk AppDynamics, and its pricing page and documentation sit on splunk.com domains. Ask your reseller which company you would contract with.
Does New Relic charge per host like AppDynamics?
No. New Relic states that hosts, containers and agents are not counted, and bills for data ingested plus users by type. Splunk AppDynamics lists $33 per host per month for Premium and $50 for Enterprise, billed annually, and $6 per vCPU for the Infrastructure edition.
Can I run New Relic or AppDynamics on my own servers?
New Relic is a hosted service. AppDynamics documents both a SaaS option and an On-Premises deployment where you prepare the host and install the Controller yourself.
How do the two handle OpenTelemetry?
New Relic accepts OTLP natively for its data types. AppDynamics documents an OpenTelemetry-compatible backend that ingests trace data through the Collector and OTLP, plus hybrid agents that add OpenTelemetry components to AppDynamics agents.
Sources
- Free tier, per-GB data ingest prices, per-user prices by edition, and the statement that hosts are not counted (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Default 30-day log retention and live archives up to seven years with separate storage and query charges (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- New Relic accepts OTLP natively over gRPC and HTTP (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Autopilot, formerly SRE Agent, helps investigate incidents and works in Slack (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Splunk AppDynamics Infrastructure, Premium and Enterprise edition list prices, included capabilities and add-on prices (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- AppDynamics ingests OpenTelemetry trace data through the Collector and OTLP, and offers hybrid and combined agent modes (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Business transactions model: agents discover request entry points and trace each request across tiers (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Anomaly Detection and Automated Root Cause Analysis for business transaction anomalies (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- AppDynamics On-Premises deployment: host preparation and Controller installation (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Log Observer Connect links the Controller to logs held in Splunk Platform with deep links (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Sazabi plan prices, included usage and overage rates (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Sazabi can be an additional OTLP/HTTP exporter next to existing Collector exporters (accessed Nov 8, 2026)