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Free-Limited
Tool Comparison
New Relic
Full-stack observability — metrics, logs, traces, and errors in one platform.
VS
At a Glance
| Attribute | New Relic | Prometheus |
|---|---|---|
| License / Pricing | Free-Limited | Open Source |
| Type | DevOps | DevOps |
| GitHub Stars | — | — |
| Rating | 4.4/5 | 4.5/5 |
| Key Features | 6 listed | 6 listed |
| Integrations | 5 listed | 6 listed |
| Categories | ObservabilityMonitoring | Monitoring |
Key Features
New Relic
- APM with distributed tracing for 15+ languages
- Unified telemetry: metrics, logs, events, and traces in one query interface
- NRQL — New Relic Query Language for flexible data exploration
- Synthetics for proactive endpoint monitoring from 20+ global locations
- Error inbox for tracking and triaging application errors
- AIOps: intelligent alert correlation to reduce notification noise
Prometheus
- Multi-dimensional data model with labels for flexible querying
- PromQL — powerful query language for aggregating and slicing metrics
- Pull-based scraping with automatic Kubernetes service discovery
- Alertmanager for deduplication, grouping, and routing of alerts
- Exporters for databases, message queues, OS, and hardware metrics
- Federation support for hierarchical multi-cluster setups
Real-World Use Cases
New Relic
Root cause analysis for a production incident
Alert fires on a spike in error rate detected by New Relic APM
Kubernetes cluster observability
Deploy the New Relic infrastructure agent as a DaemonSet
Prometheus
Kubernetes cluster monitoring with alerting
Deploy kube-prometheus-stack via Helm (includes Prometheus and Alertmanager)
Application SLO tracking
Instrument the application to expose /metrics in Prometheus format
Integrations
New Relic
kubernetesprometheusgrafanaelastic-observabilityansible
Prometheus
grafanakubernetesdatadogelastic-observabilitynewrelicansible
🏆 Which should you choose?
Choose New Relic if…
- → you want a managed or commercial offering with enterprise support and SLAs
Choose Prometheus if…
- → you need a fully open-source, self-hosted solution with no vendor lock-in