Lightstep vs New Relic? Which one is better?
In today’s landscape of microservices, cloud-native architectures, and distributed systems, observability isn’t just a luxury—it’s a necessity.
Engineering and DevOps teams need robust tools to trace requests, monitor performance, and quickly identify the root cause of incidents.
Two key players in this space are Lightstep and New Relic.
While both aim to provide end-to-end visibility, they take different approaches to solving observability challenges.
Lightstep, built with distributed tracing at its core, is known for its OpenTelemetry-first philosophy and powerful tracing capabilities.
New Relic, on the other hand, offers a full-stack observability suite, integrating APM, logs, infrastructure, and RUM in a single platform.
In this post, we’ll explore the strengths and trade-offs of Lightstep vs New Relic, helping teams decide which platform best suits their observability needs.
We’ll cover:
Key feature comparisons
Use case suitability for developers, SREs, and product teams
Pricing, integrations, and developer experience
By the end, you’ll have a clear understanding of which tool (or combination of tools) aligns with your monitoring goals.
Further reading:
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What is Lightstep?
Lightstep was founded by ex-Google engineers, including Ben Sigelman—one of the creators of Dapper, Google’s internal distributed tracing system.
The platform was built to address the growing complexity of modern, cloud-native systems by providing deep visibility into distributed applications.
At its core, Lightstep is an observability platform that specializes in distributed tracing, helping teams trace the full path of a request across microservices.
It’s designed for high-scale environments and integrates seamlessly with OpenTelemetry, making it a great choice for organizations adopting open standards.
Key Differentiators
Service-level root cause analysis: Lightstep automatically surfaces correlated performance changes, helping teams isolate the root cause quickly.
Real-time visibility: It provides near real-time insights into application behavior, allowing developers and SREs to debug faster.
Change Intelligence: Understand the “what changed and why” for every deploy, helping reduce MTTR (mean time to resolution).
Target Users
Lightstep is ideal for:
Enterprise DevOps and SRE teams managing large-scale distributed architectures
Engineering teams focused on performance and reliability
Organizations running microservices across hybrid or multi-cloud environments
Its laser focus on tracing and correlation makes it a go-to tool when latency issues, deployment problems, or unexpected service degradations arise.
What is New Relic?
New Relic is a well-established observability and application performance monitoring (APM) platform founded in 2008.
Originally focused on APM for web applications, New Relic has evolved into a comprehensive full-stack observability solution, offering unified monitoring across every layer of your tech stack.
Over the years, it has expanded to support infrastructure monitoring, logs, browser and mobile monitoring, synthetics, and distributed tracing, positioning itself as a single pane of glass for engineering and DevOps teams.
Key Differentiators
Telemetry unification: New Relic’s Telemetry Data Platform ingests metrics, events, logs, and traces from virtually any source, enabling powerful correlation and alerting.
All-in-one toolset: From backend services to frontend user experiences, New Relic combines APM, logs, infrastructure metrics, and user monitoring under one roof.
Customizable dashboards and alerts: Teams can create tailored views of performance across services, environments, and deployments with dynamic visualization options.
Target Users
New Relic is ideal for:
Full-stack engineering teams needing end-to-end visibility
DevOps and SRE teams responsible for uptime, SLAs, and root cause analysis
Organizations looking for a unified observability platform to reduce tool sprawl
Its strength lies in breadth of coverage, making it a strong candidate for teams that want to consolidate their monitoring, reduce cognitive overhead, and break down data silos across infrastructure and application layers.
Lightstep vs New Relic: Feature-by-Feature Comparison
When evaluating Lightstep vs New Relic, it’s essential to understand how their features stack up across key observability dimensions—especially in performance monitoring, distributed tracing, and infrastructure visibility.
🔍 Distributed Tracing
Lightstep: Built by the creators of OpenTracing and OpenTelemetry, Lightstep is a tracing-first platform. It excels at analyzing service-level interactions, dependencies, and root cause analysis across microservices. Its streaming architecture enables near real-time trace visibility with minimal overhead.
New Relic: While not tracing-first, New Relic offers solid distributed tracing capabilities as part of its APM suite. Its integration with OpenTelemetry allows teams to bring in custom spans, but tracing is typically secondary to its metrics/logs-first approach.
📈 APM (Application Performance Monitoring)
Lightstep: Focuses on tracing and service health, not traditional APM. It lacks deep, native code-level transaction metrics like memory usage or CPU profiling.
New Relic: One of the most mature APM offerings in the market. It captures code-level diagnostics, transaction traces, error rates, and more out-of-the-box for multiple languages and frameworks.
📊 Metrics & Telemetry
Lightstep: Offers custom metric support with an emphasis on SLIs/SLOs and service health. Integrates well with OpenTelemetry, but requires more manual setup for complete metrics visibility.
New Relic: Ingests billions of metrics per minute via its Telemetry Data Platform. Supports dashboards, alerts, anomaly detection, and forecasting with built-in intelligence.
🧪 Logs
Lightstep: No native log management system. It relies on integration with third-party solutions like Datadog, Splunk, or Fluentd for log visibility.
New Relic: Provides full log management, including parsing, querying, and correlation with traces and metrics—all from a single UI.
🧩 Integrations
Lightstep: Strong integrations with cloud-native environments, especially Kubernetes and OpenTelemetry pipelines. Focuses on observability pipelines for microservices.
New Relic: Offers hundreds of integrations—from CI/CD tools and public cloud providers to alerting platforms like Slack, PagerDuty, and Opsgenie. Easy to embed in DevOps and SRE workflows.
Lightstep vs New Relic: Performance and Scalability
As organizations scale their infrastructure and microservices footprint, observability platforms must handle massive telemetry volumes without degrading performance or increasing operational burden.
Both Lightstep and New Relic are built for high-throughput environments—but they approach scalability differently.
🚀 Lightstep: Optimized for High-Cardinality, Real-Time Data
Lightstep is engineered to handle high-cardinality telemetry data—a common trait in distributed microservices.
Its architecture leverages a streaming model rather than batch ingestion, enabling near real-time performance monitoring without the cost of centralized data storage.
Real-time data streaming: Minimizes delays in trace processing
Dynamic service diagrams: Built on the fly for scalable service relationships
Low overhead: Lightweight SDKs and intelligent sampling reduce impact on applications
This makes Lightstep ideal for latency-sensitive, high-scale environments where traditional APM solutions may falter under the weight of unique service combinations and spans.
🏗️ New Relic: Enterprise-Grade Scalability with Data Control
New Relic’s Telemetry Data Platform is designed to support petabyte-scale ingestion of metrics, logs, traces, and events.
It gives organizations control over data retention, sampling, and ingest pipelines to optimize performance at scale.
Ingestion pipelines: Efficient for both batch and real-time data
Retention policies: Customizable per account/module to balance cost and insight
Edge data collection: Minimizes central bottlenecks with distributed agents
New Relic shines in heterogeneous, enterprise environments with broad observability needs—from infrastructure to frontend—all under one umbrella.
⚖️ System Overhead & Latency Impact
Lightstep typically introduces less latency and CPU overhead due to its sampling approach and focus on only the most relevant traces. It’s a performance-friendly option for highly distributed apps.
New Relic introduces more resource usage in comparison, especially when deep APM instrumentation is enabled. However, its performance analytics granularity is often worth the trade-off for teams that need exhaustive visibility.
Lightstep vs New Relic: Pricing Model
Pricing is a crucial factor when selecting an observability platform—especially as your telemetry volume grows.
While both Lightstep and New Relic offer usage-based pricing, the way they measure and charge for usage differs significantly.
💸 Lightstep: Trace- and Span-Based Pricing
Lightstep’s pricing is centered around the volume of traces and spans stored, making it well-suited for teams focused primarily on distributed tracing.
Pricing factors: Number of services, spans ingested, retention duration
Free tier: Offers 100 GB of span data per month, with access to core features
Ideal for: Teams optimizing trace performance and root cause analysis with precision control
Because Lightstep charges based on actual tracing activity, it offers more predictability for teams that only need visibility into specific services or interactions without tracking all telemetry types.
🧮 New Relic: Telemetry Ingest-Based Billing
New Relic’s pricing is based on ingested data across all telemetry types—logs, metrics, traces, events, etc.—and charges per GB ingested.
Pricing factors: Ingestion volume + number of full platform users
Free tier: 100 GB of telemetry ingest per month, unlimited basic users
Ideal for: Teams requiring holistic observability across backend, frontend, and infrastructure
This model is beneficial for organizations seeking all-in-one monitoring, but costs can escalate quickly if telemetry is not managed or sampled efficiently.
🆓 Free Tier & Scalability Comparison
| Feature | Lightstep Free Tier | New Relic Free Tier |
|---|---|---|
| Trace Volume | 100 GB spans/month | 100 GB telemetry/month |
| Retention | 3 days | Varies by telemetry type |
| Users | Unlimited | Unlimited basic users |
| Paid Plan Starts | After free span limit | After free ingest limit |
🔍 Cost Transparency & Predictability
Lightstep is more predictable for trace-heavy teams with clear usage patterns and a narrow observability scope.
New Relic provides expansive insights but may require fine-tuning ingestion rules and dashboards to stay within budget as data scales.
Both platforms offer cost calculators and usage dashboards to help monitor spend, but choosing the right pricing model depends heavily on your team’s telemetry strategy.
Lightstep vs New Relic: Developer and DevOps Experience
A great observability platform isn’t just about features—it’s also about how easy it is for developers and DevOps engineers to integrate, use, and scale within their workflows.
Here’s how Lightstep and New Relic stack up when it comes to developer experience.
🚀 Setup and Onboarding
Lightstep is designed with OpenTelemetry at its core, which makes it straightforward to integrate into modern, cloud-native environments.
It provides SDKs and agents for a wide range of languages and platforms, with guided onboarding flows to instrument services quickly.
Supports microservices-first environments
Emphasis on OpenTelemetry-native setup
Streamlined UI for service mapping and dependency tracing
New Relic also offers a robust onboarding process, with automatic instrumentation agents for several languages, as well as support for OpenTelemetry, though it may require more configuration for full-stack observability setups.
Auto-instrumentation agents for Java, .NET, Python, Node.js, etc.
“One dashboard to rule them all” approach
Rich onboarding UI and quickstart templates
🔌 Ease of Integration
| Integration Area | Lightstep | New Relic |
|---|---|---|
| OpenTelemetry | First-class support (native) | Supported (OTLP support improving) |
| CI/CD Tooling | Native GitHub Actions, CLI tools | Prebuilt integrations with CI/CD |
| SDKs | Modern and focused on tracing | Broader but may need tuning |
| Third-Party Ecosystem | Growing, focused on tracing context | Mature ecosystem with >500 plugins |
📘 Documentation, CLI, and Community
Both platforms provide comprehensive documentation, but the approach and depth vary:
Lightstep: Clean, focused documentation for tracing; excellent OpenTelemetry integration guides; active developer-centric community and Slack.
New Relic: Extensive docs for full observability use cases; tutorials and community Q&A are abundant; CLI (NR1) for automation and scripted workflows.
🧠 Learning Curve and Support
Lightstep offers a lower barrier to entry for teams focused solely on distributed tracing, but understanding span relationships and service architecture may still require some ramp-up.
New Relic has a steeper learning curve due to its breadth—logs, metrics, traces, synthetics, and dashboards—but once configured, it becomes a powerful central observability hub.
Bottom Line:
Choose Lightstep for fast, clean, and focused observability around traces with strong OpenTelemetry alignment.
Choose New Relic if you want a broad, unified observability experience and are comfortable with a richer but more complex setup.
Lightstep vs New Relic: Use Case Comparison
While both Lightstep and New Relic are leaders in the observability space, they cater to different needs and team preferences.
Choosing the right tool depends on the complexity of your system architecture, the types of data you want to observe, and your workflow priorities.
✅ Use Lightstep if:
You’re running a microservices-heavy architecture
Lightstep is purpose-built for modern, distributed systems where services communicate across many layers. Its powerful tracing capabilities excel in tracking requests as they travel across containers and services.You need deep, real-time tracing across complex services
Lightstep provides near-instantaneous insights with granular visibility into spans, dependencies, and service-level root cause analysis. This makes it perfect for debugging performance issues that arise deep in your service mesh.You’re already using OpenTelemetry
Lightstep was one of the earliest platforms to adopt and contribute to OpenTelemetry, making it a natural choice for organizations that want a vendor-neutral, standards-based instrumentation strategy.
✅ Use New Relic if:
You’re looking for an all-in-one observability solution
New Relic unifies APM, logs, infrastructure metrics, browser monitoring, synthetics, and traces—all on one platform. This breadth makes it an ideal solution for teams that want centralized visibility across their stack.You manage both legacy and modern systems
New Relic supports a wide range of environments—from monolithic apps to Kubernetes clusters. Its mature integrations help teams with mixed workloads transition to modern observability without dropping legacy coverage.You want pre-built dashboards and alerting out of the box
With over 500+ integrations, quickstart templates, and an intuitive UI, New Relic allows faster setup for visualizing app health, setting thresholds, and configuring incident alerts.
TL;DR:
Use Lightstep for deep distributed tracing and OpenTelemetry-first workflows.
Use New Relic for broad observability coverage and team-wide monitoring needs.
Lightstep vs New Relic: Pros and Cons Summary
When evaluating observability platforms like Lightstep and New Relic, it’s crucial to consider their respective strengths and trade-offs based on what your team values most—be it tracing granularity, unified dashboards, or OpenTelemetry alignment.
Lightstep Pros:
✅ Best-in-class distributed tracing
Lightstep excels at providing high-fidelity tracing across microservices, making it ideal for complex, cloud-native systems.
✅ Purpose-built for OpenTelemetry
Designed with OpenTelemetry at its core, Lightstep offers seamless integration and long-term flexibility in vendor-neutral instrumentation.
❌ Limited APM/log capabilities
While powerful in tracing, Lightstep doesn’t offer the same depth in log management, infrastructure monitoring, or application performance metrics as broader platforms.
New Relic Pros:
✅ Full-stack observability
New Relic gives you APM, logs, metrics, synthetics, browser, and mobile monitoring—all from a single pane of glass.
✅ Strong APM and logs integration
New Relic’s unified telemetry pipeline allows you to correlate logs with traces and metrics in real time for faster incident response.
❌ Tracing depth may not match Lightstep’s granularity
While New Relic supports distributed tracing, its granularity and focus are broader than Lightstep’s specialized tracing depth.
This summary offers a quick-glance view for teams evaluating which tool better matches their needs—whether it’s microservice tracing or end-to-end observability.
Lightstep vs New Relic: Final Verdict
Choosing between Lightstep and New Relic ultimately comes down to your team’s observability priorities and the complexity of your system architecture.
🔄 Recap of Major Differences
Lightstep shines in distributed tracing and is tailored for microservices-first environments using OpenTelemetry. It’s ideal for organizations that want deep trace analysis and real-time service-level insights.
New Relic is a robust, all-in-one observability platform that offers full-stack visibility—APM, infrastructure monitoring, logs, and frontend tracking—all integrated into a unified experience.
🧠 Which Teams Should Choose What?
Choose Lightstep if you’re operating at scale with complex microservices, need precise root cause analysis, and are heavily invested in OpenTelemetry.
Choose New Relic if you’re looking for a broad observability solution that covers everything from infrastructure to end-user performance, with a focus on ease of use and pre-built dashboards.
🔗 Can You Use Both?
Absolutely.
Some engineering teams pair Lightstep with New Relic—using Lightstep for deep tracing and New Relic for APM, logging, and infrastructure metrics.
This hybrid approach can offer the best of both worlds if your stack and budget allow for it.
Conclusion
In the world of modern observability, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution.
Your choice between Lightstep and New Relic should align with your team’s core needs—whether that’s pinpointing bottlenecks in a complex microservices architecture or gaining a holistic view of your entire system from infrastructure to user experience.
If granular, real-time tracing is your top priority, Lightstep is hard to beat.
If you’re looking for an all-in-one observability stack with seamless integrations and a comprehensive UI, New Relic offers powerful flexibility.
💡 Our recommendation? Take advantage of their free tiers and explore how each tool fits into your stack.
Hands-on experience is the best way to assess which platform truly supports your performance goals, team workflow, and system complexity.
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