New Relic vs Sentry: Full-Stack Telemetry Platform or Developer-First Error Tracking
Prices and facts checked on vendor pages on Nov 8, 2026.
New Relic is a usage-priced telemetry platform that covers APM, infrastructure, logs, browser, mobile, and an AI agent called Autopilot. Sentry started as error tracking and has grown into tracing, logs, session replay, and an AI debugger, all organized around the issue a developer needs to fix. Choose by how your team works: who opens the tool, and which unit you want to pay for.
The Short Answer
Pick New Relic when platform, SRE, and application teams share one tool for infrastructure, services, and logs, and you want to pay for data volume plus a small number of power users. Pick Sentry when developers own the fix, you want error grouping tied to releases and commits, and you want unlimited users on a plan fee. Plenty of teams run both, since a Sentry SDK can be added without touching a New Relic agent.
New Relic vs Sentry at a Glance
How New Relic Charges
These are list prices from newrelic.com/pricing, checked November 8, 2026. Data is $0.40 per GB beyond the free 100 GB each month on the original option, or $0.60 per GB with Data Plus, which adds up to 90 extra days of retention and other governance features. EU storage adds $0.05 per GB.
Users are the second meter. Basic users are free and can query data and build dashboards. Core users cost $49 and can reach the errors inbox and the log management UI. Full platform users get the curated APM, infrastructure, browser, and mobile experiences: on Standard that is $10 for the first user and $99 for each additional one, up to five. On Pro it is $349 per user with an annual commitment or $418.80 on monthly pay as you go. Enterprise is custom.
On the free edition, a month over 100 GB stops ingest and locks you out of the platform until the next month or an upgrade. Plan for that before you point production logs at it.
How Sentry Charges
Sentry's pricing page lists Developer at $0 for one user, Team at $26 per month, and Business at $80 per month, both paid plans when billed annually with default prepaid data. Team and Business include unlimited users, 50k errors, 5 GB of logs, 5 GB of application metrics, and 5M spans. Past the base quota, errors on Team cost $0.0003625 each between 50K and 100K, falling to $0.00015 above 20M. Logs and application metrics are $0.50 per GB, and Sentry says additional log usage can only be bought through the pay-as-you-go budget.
Sentry's docs state that data sent after your reserved volume and PAYG budget are used up is dropped, and you are not charged for it. A spike can therefore cost you visibility instead of money. Seer is billed separately at $40 per active contributor, meaning anyone who makes two or more pull requests in a Seer-enabled repository that month.
Worked example. Assume five engineers and 150 GB of telemetry a month on New Relic Standard with five full platform users. Users: $10 + 4 x $99 = $406. Data: 50 GB over the free 100 GB x $0.40 = $20. Total: $426 per month. On Sentry Team, assume 100k errors and 5 GB of logs a month: $26 plus 50k extra errors x $0.0003625 = $18.13, so $44.13. These bills do not cover the same ground, since one is 150 GB of mixed telemetry and the other is 100k errors, but they show how differently the meters behave as headcount and data grow.
Where the Products Differ
The unit of work. In Sentry, many events fold into one issue by fingerprint, and your quota is consumed by events, not issues. The Issues page, ownership rules, and suspect commits all hang off that issue. New Relic's errors inbox also groups errors and posts to Slack, but it sits inside a larger platform where an error is one signal among many attached to a service, host, or deployment.
Infrastructure and logs. New Relic includes unlimited hosts, containers, and cloud functions and bills ingest, so your infrastructure telemetry and your application errors land in one bill. Sentry logs are structured and trace-connected, so you can click from a log line to the trace and its errors, but Sentry's raw text search covers the message attribute rather than the full log JSON.
AI. Seer analyzes Sentry issues, can open a pull request, and can hand its analysis to an external coding agent, though it needs GitHub.com or GitLab.com. New Relic's Autopilot triages alerts, investigates incidents across metrics, traces, and logs, suggests remediation, and works from Slack. It is capped at 100 requests per hour per organization and needs Pro or Enterprise with Advanced Compute.
Retention. New Relic's defaults vary by data source: 8 days for APM and APM errors, 30 for logs, and 90 for mobile crashes, all before Data Plus. Sentry applies one lookback per plan.
When to Pick New Relic
- You need infrastructure, APM, logs, and browser or mobile data in one place, and your whole stack is more than application code.
- Only a handful of people need the full UI, and everyone else can work as a free basic user.
- You want a long log archive, up to seven years through live archives.
- You need FedRAMP Moderate or HIPAA eligibility, which New Relic lists with Data Plus on Enterprise.
When to Pick Sentry
- Developers triage and fix, and you want unlimited seats from the Team plan up.
- You depend on release health, suspect commits, ownership rules, or session replay next to errors.
- You want a predictable plan fee with a spend cap, and you accept that data stops when the cap is reached.
- You want the option to run the software yourself: Sentry's licensing page says anyone should be able to run Sentry for themselves.
Where Sazabi Fits
Sazabi is AI-native observability and security that runs next to both tools, not instead of them. You can point a Sentry SDK at a Sazabi DSN beside your existing Sentry project, or add an OTLP exporter to an OpenTelemetry Collector that already feeds New Relic. Its agent investigates in Slack and opens issues. Sazabi's Browser and React Native SDKs capture errors, console output, network calls with trace context, user interactions, navigation and session identity from web and mobile apps. They do not capture Core Web Vitals or session replay.
See Sazabi vs New Relic, Sazabi vs Sentry, the New Relic alternatives page, or the Sentry integration. Sazabi's own plans and overage rates are on the pricing page.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do New Relic and Sentry bill differently?
New Relic bills gigabytes ingested above a free 100 GB per month plus a per-user fee for full platform and core users. Sentry bills a plan price that includes quotas for errors, logs, spans and other categories, then per-event or per-GB overage from a pay-as-you-go budget. Sentry plans allow unlimited users on Team and above.
Can New Relic replace Sentry for error tracking?
New Relic has an errors inbox that collects errors from APM, browser, mobile, and AWS Lambda in one place and posts to Slack. Core users and above can open it. Sentry puts error grouping, ownership rules, suspect commits, and Seer at the center of the product, so compare the day-to-day workflow rather than the feature checklist.
Which one keeps logs longer?
New Relic keeps logs for 30 days by default and 120 days with Data Plus, and live archives can extend that to seven years with separate storage and query charges. Sentry lists a 30-day lookback on the free Developer plan and up to 90 days on Team and Business.
Can I send OpenTelemetry data to both?
Yes, with limits. New Relic documents an OTLP endpoint for its platform. Sentry accepts OTLP traces and logs in open beta, directly or through an OpenTelemetry Collector, and does not support OTLP metrics.
Sources
- Free tier, data ingest rates, user types and per-user prices, Data Plus, EU data center add-on, synthetic checks (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Default retention by data source for the original data option and Data Plus, retention add-on price (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Thirty-day default log retention and live archives up to seven years (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Errors inbox scope across APM, browser, mobile and Lambda, Slack notifications, error profiles (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- What basic, core and full platform users can access, and which user types are billable (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Autopilot capabilities, Slack use, plan and compute requirements, request limit (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- OpenTelemetry support and the OTLP endpoint (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Plan prices, included quotas, log and metric overage rates, retention lookback per plan, feature list (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Per-error overage rates, PAYG budget behavior, dropped data after quota, Seer price per active contributor (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Events grouped into issues by fingerprint, and quota consumed by events rather than issues (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Seer capabilities, GitHub and GitLab requirement, active contributor billing (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- OTLP ingestion of traces and logs in open beta, no OTLP metrics, Collector forwarding (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Structured logs that are trace-connected, and raw text search limited to the message attribute (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Functional Source License on the web app code, MIT SDKs, stated goal that anyone can run Sentry themselves (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Sazabi plan prices, included usage, overage rates and retention per plan (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Sending Sentry SDK events to a Sazabi DSN, alone or alongside Sentry (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Adding a Sazabi OTLP exporter next to existing Collector exporters (accessed Nov 8, 2026)