New Relic vs Dynatrace: Per-User Pricing, Per-Host Pricing and Where Each Fits
Prices and facts checked on vendor pages on Nov 8, 2026.
New Relic and Dynatrace both cover APM, infrastructure, logs, and user monitoring. New Relic meters data ingested and the engineers who log in. Dynatrace meters hosts by memory size and data by the GiB, and it asks for an annual spend commitment. Neither is simply the cheaper one: the bill follows headcount on one side and host count on the other.
The Short Answer
Pick New Relic when you have a small team, a lot of hosts or containers, or want to start on a permanent free tier. Pick Dynatrace when you run a large estate, want automatic instrumentation from a single agent per host, and have enough engineers that per-user fees would add up. If you want to keep your OpenTelemetry pipeline neutral, both accept OTLP.
New Relic vs Dynatrace at a Glance
How New Relic Charges
These are list prices checked on November 8, 2026. New Relic has two inputs. Data ingest is free for the first 100 GB each month, then $0.40 per GB, or $0.60 per GB if you choose Data Plus for longer retention and extra governance features. Users come in three types. Basic users are free and core users are $49. Full platform users are $10 for the first and $99 for each additional one on Standard, which caps at five, or $349 each on Pro with an annual commitment ($418.80 pay as you go). Enterprise is quoted. New Relic states that hosts, containers and agents are not counted.
Worked example: five engineers who need full access and 500 GB of telemetry a month. On Pro with an annual commitment, that is 5 x $349 = $1,745 plus (500 - 100) x $0.40 = $160, for $1,905 a month. On Standard it is $10 + 4 x $99 = $406 plus the same $160, for $566.
How Dynatrace Charges
Dynatrace sells a platform subscription: one annual commitment that every capability draws down at published rates, with usage beyond the commit billed monthly at the same rates. Full-Stack Monitoring is $58 per month for each 8 GiB of host memory ($0.01 per memory-GiB-hour). It includes APM, code-level profiling, Kubernetes monitoring, and a trace allowance. Infrastructure Monitoring is $29 per host and Foundation & Discovery is $7 per host. Logs on the Pay-per-Query model cost $0.20 per GiB ingested, $0.0007 per GiB-day retained, and $0.0035 per GiB scanned. A Bundled Queries model is $0.02 per GiB-day with queries included.
A comparable example: ten Full-Stack hosts with 16 GiB each, plus 500 GiB of logs a month retained 14 days and 2,000 GiB scanned. Hosts are 10 x 2 x $58 = $1,160. Logs are 500 x $0.20 = $100 to ingest, 500 x 14 x $0.0007 = $4.90 to retain, and 2,000 x $0.0035 = $7 to scan. The total is $1,271.90, before any commit discount and before custom metrics beyond the allowance. The two totals do not buy the same thing, because one counts engineers and the other counts memory.
Query Languages and Retention
New Relic's NRQL is SQL-like and drives its own charts and alerts, so a query you write is the same kind that sits behind a dashboard tile. Dynatrace queries Grail, its data store, with DQL, and its generative AI turns natural language into DQL queries, with a limit of 25 questions per user in a rolling 15 minutes.
Retention differs in shape. New Relic keeps logs 30 days by default and lets you extend to seven years through live archives, billed separately for storage and queries. Dynatrace lets you set log retention per GiB-day, and its metrics price includes 15 months of retention at one-minute granularity.
Instrumentation and Deployment
Dynatrace leans on OneAgent: one per host collects data and turns on instrumentation automatically for what it finds. You can also send it OpenTelemetry. New Relic points you to its OTLP endpoint for OpenTelemetry data and prefers HTTP/protobuf over gRPC across the public internet.
For control over where the platform runs, Dynatrace documents a Managed deployment: cluster nodes you install and operate, with Mission Control support access on by default. New Relic is a hosted service, with an EU data center available for an additional $0.05 per GB.
AI Assistants
New Relic Autopilot, formerly SRE Agent, correlates telemetry, proposes root causes and next actions, and can be used from Slack by mentioning the New Relic app. Dynatrace lists AI Exploration as included and Agentic Operations at $0.10 per AI unit, where an autonomous multi-step investigation averages 30 units. Dynatrace also says some of these tasks are not billed inside Dynatrace Assist for a limited time, so recheck before you budget.
When to Pick New Relic
- You have a handful of engineers who need full access and many more hosts or containers.
- You want a permanent free tier while you evaluate.
- You need logs kept for years and are fine paying separately for storage and queries.
- You want one price per GB whether the data is logs, traces, or metrics.
When to Pick Dynatrace
- You run hundreds of hosts and want one agent per host to find and instrument processes automatically.
- Many engineers need full access, so per-user fees would dominate.
- You want to run the platform in your own environment through Managed.
- You prefer one annual commit that every capability, including security and user monitoring, draws from.
Where Sazabi Fits
Sazabi is AI-native observability and security that can run beside either tool. If your logs already pass through an OpenTelemetry Collector, you can add Sazabi as another exporter and keep New Relic or Dynatrace in place. Its agent investigates in Slack and opens issues.
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.
For one-to-one comparisons, see Sazabi vs New Relic and Sazabi vs Dynatrace, or browse Dynatrace alternatives and New Relic alternatives. Plans are on the Sazabi pricing page.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is New Relic or Dynatrace cheaper?
It depends on how many people need full access and how many hosts you run. New Relic lists $0.40 per GB beyond a free 100 GB each month plus $349 per full platform user on Pro with an annual commitment. Dynatrace lists $58 per month for each 8 GiB of host memory on Full-Stack Monitoring, with logs billed per GiB. A small team with many hosts tends to favor New Relic. A large team on few hosts tends to favor Dynatrace.
Does Dynatrace have a free tier like New Relic?
The Dynatrace pricing page lists a rate card and an annual commitment, with no permanent free tier. New Relic lists a free tier with 100 GB of data ingest per month and one free full platform user.
Which supports OpenTelemetry?
Both. New Relic documents native OTLP ingest over gRPC and HTTP and recommends HTTP/protobuf. Dynatrace accepts OTLP traces, metrics and logs over OTLP/HTTP, directly or through a Collector.
Can I self-host either one?
New Relic is a hosted service. Dynatrace documents a Managed deployment where you install and run the cluster nodes yourself. Confirm with Dynatrace whether Managed is offered for a new purchase.
Sources
- Free tier, per-GB data ingest prices, per-user prices by edition, Data Plus, EU data center add-on (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Default 30-day log retention and live archives up to seven years, billed separately for storage and queries (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Native OTLP ingest over gRPC and HTTP, with HTTP/protobuf recommended (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- NRQL is a SQL-like query language that also powers New Relic charts, dashboards and alerts (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Autopilot (formerly SRE Agent) investigates incidents, suggests next steps and works in Slack (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Rate card for Full-Stack, Infrastructure and Foundation hosts, log, metric and trace units, AI units and the annual commit model (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- One OneAgent per host collects monitoring data and activates instrumentation automatically (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- OTLP traces, metrics and logs can go directly over OTLP/HTTP or through a Collector to the Dynatrace OTLP API (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Dynatrace Managed runs as cluster nodes you install and operate yourself (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Dynatrace Intelligence generative AI turns natural language into DQL and has a per-user question throughput limit (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)