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It's a split decision.
Choose Grafana for telemetry-focused observability, dashboards and usage-based Pro pricing; the $19 monthly platform fee is not the whole bill. Choose New Relic for a platform spanning application, infrastructure, logs, security and digital experience, with a $10 first full-platform user on Standard and $99 per additional user. Both offer free plans, but caps differ: Grafana lists 10,000 active metric series and 50 GB/month for logs, traces and profiles; New Relic lists 100 GB/month ingest.
01Side by side
| Grafana | New Relic | |
|---|---|---|
| Starting price | Pro: $19/month platform fee, plus usage | Standard: $10/month for first full-platform user |
| Free plan | 10,000 active series; 50 GB/month logs, traces, profiles | 100 GB/month ingest; one full-platform user |
| Best for | Teams scaling Grafana Cloud usage | Small teams starting out; complex workloads at Pro |
| Core strength | Unified telemetry, dashboards, cost controls, AI operations | Application, infrastructure, logs, security, digital experience |
| Learning curve | Not published | Not published |
| Integrations/data | Logs, metrics, traces, profiles; Knowledge Graph context | Application, infrastructure, log, security, user-experience data |
| Team/seat costs | Platform fee plus usage; allowances vary by product | $99 per additional Standard full-platform user |
| Support | Pro: 8×5 email support | Standard: 2-business-day response SLA |
Grafana Choose Grafana if
- Choose Grafana if you want its free 10k-series and 50 GB/month allowances
- Choose Grafana if you need telemetry cost controls and shared signal context
- Choose Grafana if you prefer a platform fee plus usage billing
New Relic Choose New Relic if
- Choose New Relic if you need 100 GB/month ingest on the free plan
- Choose New Relic if you want application, infrastructure, security and experience monitoring
- Choose New Relic if you value published user pricing and support response SLAs
02Pricing compared
Both offer free plans, but their paid pricing works differently. Grafana’s pricing page lists Free with 10,000 active metric series and 50 GB/month for logs, traces and profiles. Pro starts with a $19 monthly platform fee, then charges for usage above included allowances; the page does not publish an annual price. Enterprise requires a $25,000 annual spend commit.
New Relic Free includes 100 GB of ingest per month and one full-platform user. Standard lists $10 for its first full-platform user, then $99 per additional user, capped at five; core users cost $49 each. Pro is $349 per user/month with an annual commitment or $418.80 month to month. Both can add costs beyond the headline price: Grafana bills for product usage, while New Relic charges for excess ingest and some add-ons. Compare your expected telemetry volume and user count before choosing.
03Features and depth
Grafana’s offer is centered on telemetry: metrics, logs, traces and profiles, with dashboards and a Knowledge Graph for shared context. Its listed features also include an AI assistant, root-cause investigations, agent observability and Adaptive Telemetry, which identifies data to keep and aggregates the rest. That mix suits teams that want to assemble observability around telemetry signals and manage their data costs.
New Relic’s listed scope spans application, infrastructure, log, security and digital-experience monitoring. It highlights linking application performance to customer experience, searching logs in place, monitoring AI models and agents, and prioritizing vulnerabilities by production impact. Both cover AI monitoring and broad observability, but the product descriptions emphasize different work: Grafana calls out telemetry controls and dashboards; New Relic emphasizes applications, user experience and security alongside infrastructure. The published information does not establish that one has deeper coverage across every feature, so map the specific signals and workflows you need before switching.
04Ease of use and learning curve
The published product information does not publish setup time or a learning-curve comparison, so we would not treat either platform as the easier choice by default. Grafana’s free plan has community support; Pro lists 8×5 email support. New Relic Standard lists a two-business-day support response SLA, while Pro lists two hours for critical issues. Those are support terms, not a measure of how quickly a team can learn the product.
The published reviews score ease of use at 6 for Grafana and 7 for New Relic, but those scores do not explain the reviewers’ workflows. For a practical decision, compare the signals your team needs to bring together, then check whether the usage-based bill or per-user bill fits your team. The pricing pages make those cost models clearer than the learning curve.
Questions people ask
Is Grafana cheaper than New Relic?
Not automatically. Grafana Pro starts with a $19 monthly platform fee, then adds usage charges above included allowances. New Relic Standard lists $10 for the first full-platform user and $99 for each additional one. Your telemetry volume and user count determine which model costs less.
What do the free plans include?
Grafana Free lists 10,000 active metric series per month and 50 GB/month for logs, traces and profiles, with 14-day retention. New Relic Free lists 100 GB of ingest per month, one full-platform user, unlimited basic users and at least eight days of retention.
Does Grafana charge per user?
The published Grafana pricing lists a $19 monthly Pro platform fee plus usage, rather than a Pro price per user. Grafana Assistant Pro is a separate add-on at $20 per active AI user, including 40 million tokens per user per month.
How much does New Relic Pro cost?
The pricing information lists New Relic Pro at $349 per user/month with an annual commitment, or $418.80 per user/month month to month. Core users are listed at $49 each. Enterprise pricing is custom and is not published.