New Relic vs Bugsnag? Which one is better for you?
In today’s fast-paced software development landscape, application monitoring and error tracking are critical components of delivering high-performing, resilient digital experiences.
Whether you’re running a microservices-based SaaS product or a mobile app at scale, having real-time insight into application health and user-impacting errors is no longer optional—it’s essential.
New Relic and Bugsnag are two widely adopted platforms that serve overlapping, yet distinct, observability needs.
New Relic is known for its comprehensive full-stack observability, offering tools for performance monitoring, infrastructure visibility, and end-to-end tracing.
Bugsnag, on the other hand, is purpose-built for error monitoring, specializing in detailed diagnostics for crashes, exceptions, and stability scores across web and mobile applications.
This post provides a detailed comparison of New Relic vs Bugsnag to help developers, SREs, and engineering leaders choose the right tool based on their operational goals, team size, and application stack.
We’ll break down:
Core features and differences
Integration capabilities
Pricing models
Use case fit and real-world considerations
Whether you’re looking to consolidate your observability stack or need a specialized error reporting tool, this guide has you covered.
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Overview of New Relic and Bugsnag
New Relic: A Full-Stack Observability Platform
Founded in 2008, New Relic has grown into a leading observability platform trusted by engineering teams worldwide.
Designed to offer a unified view of application and infrastructure performance, New Relic supports a wide range of monitoring capabilities through its flagship platform, New Relic One.
Key Features:
Application Performance Monitoring (APM): Deep insights into application latency, throughput, and transaction tracing.
Infrastructure Monitoring: Visibility into host health, container metrics, and cloud service performance.
Log Management: Unified logs alongside APM and infrastructure data for contextual troubleshooting.
Real User Monitoring (RUM): Tracks user interactions and front-end performance.
Synthetic Monitoring: Simulates user traffic to test application uptime and performance proactively.
Primary Use Case:
New Relic is ideal for teams seeking end-to-end observability across modern applications—particularly in microservices, cloud-native, or hybrid architectures.
Related Read: AppDynamics vs New Relic
Bugsnag: Focused Error Monitoring
Bugsnag, founded in 2013 and later acquired by SmartBear, specializes in providing developers with actionable insights into runtime errors across web, mobile, and backend applications.
Unlike traditional log-based error reporting, Bugsnag emphasizes application stability and user impact visibility.
Key Features:
Real-Time Error Monitoring: Detects and aggregates errors with contextual stack traces and metadata.
Stability Scores: Quantifies how often users experience crashes, aiding in release management.
User Impact Analysis: Identifies which users are affected and how severely, to prioritize fixes.
Breadcrumbs and Session Info: Rich debugging context for each crash or error.
Multi-platform Support: JavaScript, iOS, Android, Node.js, Python, and more.
Primary Use Case:
Bugsnag is purpose-built for developer teams who want to quickly identify, debug, and resolve runtime exceptions and crash issues—especially in consumer-facing applications where user experience is key.
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New Relic vs Bugsnag : Feature Comparison
The following table outlines how Bugsnag and New Relic compare across key areas.
| Feature | New Relic | Bugsnag |
|---|---|---|
| Application Performance Monitoring (APM) | ✅ Full support with detailed transaction tracing | ❌ Not included |
| Error Monitoring & Crash Reporting | ✅ Available, but not as specialized as Bugsnag | ✅ Core focus with in-depth stack traces and diagnostics |
| Real User Monitoring (RUM) | ✅ Tracks user interactions, front-end performance | 🚫 Not supported directly |
| Infrastructure Monitoring | ✅ Servers, containers, and cloud infrastructure | ❌ Not supported |
| Log Management | ✅ Centralized logs with correlation to performance data | ❌ Requires integration with other tools |
| Stability Score & User Impact | ❌ Not native | ✅ Built-in for release tracking and prioritization |
| Deployment Tracking | ✅ Tracks performance by deploy | ✅ Tracks stability by deploy |
| Mobile App Monitoring | ✅ Limited support (via agents) | ✅ Strong support with crash analytics |
| Custom Alerting | ✅ Flexible and deep alerting options | ✅ Error-focused alerts with thresholds |
| Integration Ecosystem | ✅ Wide range: AWS, Azure, Kubernetes, Slack, PagerDuty | ✅ Developer tools: GitHub, JIRA, Slack, and more |
| Ease of Setup | ⚙️ Requires agent installation and config | ⚡ Quick SDK drop-in |
| Target Audience | SREs, DevOps, Infra, full-stack teams | Front-end & back-end developers |
New Relic vs Bugsnag: Developer Experience and Usability
New Relic: Powerful but Potentially Overwhelming
One of the things that New Relic offers is a robust and comprehensive UI that covers everything from APM and infrastructure to logs and traces.
The dashboard is highly customizable, providing a holistic view of system health.
However, this richness in functionality can also be a double-edged sword—new users, especially those focused only on error tracking, may find the interface overwhelming.
It’s a platform that shines for full-stack observability but comes with a steeper learning curve.
From a developer’s standpoint, integrating New Relic requires installing and configuring agents for each language or service, which may take some time upfront.
Once set up, however, it provides deep performance insights across the stack.
Bugsnag: Purpose-Built for Developers
Bugsnag is designed with developers in mind.
The interface is clean, focused, and centered around the concept of errors and their impact on users.
Its Stability Score metric provides an at-a-glance view of application health post-deployment, making it incredibly intuitive for engineering teams.
Integration is lightweight—just a few lines of code via an SDK, and you’re ready to start monitoring.
Bugsnag surfaces stack traces, affected users, deployment history, and release health in a developer-friendly way without excess noise.
Learning Curve and Integration
While New Relic offers end-to-end observability, it may require more time to master and fine-tune depending on your monitoring goals.
Bugsnag, by contrast, gets you started quickly and is ideal for teams focused primarily on catching and fixing application errors without diving into infrastructure metrics.
If your team consists mostly of developers focused on code quality and error resolution, Bugsnag delivers a smoother out-of-the-box experience.
For teams managing complex systems and needing broader visibility, New Relic is worth the investment in learning and setup.
New Relic vs Bugsnag: Performance and Alerting Capabilities
New Relic: Advanced, Flexible Alerting and SLO Management
Firstly, New Relic provides a rich set of alerting features that go beyond basic threshold-based notifications.
It supports anomaly detection using AI/ML, allowing teams to catch unexpected behavior before it escalates.
Users can configure alerts based on golden signals (latency, traffic, errors, saturation), and define Service Level Objectives (SLOs) with custom burn rate calculations for more reliable incident management.
You can also set multi-condition alert policies, integrate with channels like Slack, PagerDuty, and Opsgenie, and correlate alerts with deployments or recent changes—all of which empower Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) and DevOps teams to maintain uptime and service health proactively.
Bugsnag: Developer-Centric Error Alerting
Bugsnag focuses on error-centric alerting, which is perfect for front-end and back-end developers tracking crash frequency, new regressions, and unusual error spikes.
It provides out-of-the-box alerting for things like:
New errors introduced in a release
Regressions of previously fixed issues
Errors affecting specific users or versions
Bugsnag integrates with popular tools like Slack, Jira, and GitHub, enabling real-time issue tracking and resolution.
Its alerting is tuned for actionable insights—surfacing only the errors that matter most to user experience and app stability.
Comparing Alerting Depth and Use Case
New Relic’s alerting is deeply integrated with full-stack telemetry—ideal for production monitoring, SLA enforcement, and proactive incident response.
Bugsnag, on the other hand, is tailored for tracking application-level failures and user-impacting bugs, with less emphasis on broader system performance.
If you’re looking for deep infrastructure and service-level alerting, New Relic is the stronger choice.
If your focus is quickly catching and resolving bugs before users complain, Bugsnag’s simplicity and precision may be all you need.
New Relic vs Bugsnag: Integrations and Ecosystem
New Relic: Broad Ecosystem for DevOps and Observability
One of the things that New Relic offers is a wide-ranging set of integrations that cater to the entire software development and operations lifecycle.
Whether you’re using AWS, Azure, or GCP, New Relic provides native support for ingesting cloud telemetry.
It also integrates with popular CI/CD tools like Jenkins, CircleCI, GitHub Actions, and Terraform, making it a strong fit for DevOps teams looking to connect performance metrics to deployment activity.
Additionally, New Relic supports collaboration and incident response tools like Slack, PagerDuty, ServiceNow, and Jira.
This makes it easier to route alerts, escalate issues, and tie performance regressions directly to code changes or infrastructure deployments.
For those building custom workflows, New Relic’s robust API and Terraform provider allow extensive automation and integration across observability stacks.
Bugsnag: Developer-Focused Integration Suite
Bugsnag excels in developer-centric integrations, with a strong emphasis on connecting error tracking to source code and issue management tools.
It seamlessly integrates with:
Version control: GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket
Issue tracking: Jira, Trello, Linear
Collaboration tools: Slack, Microsoft Teams
CI/CD pipelines: Jenkins, GitHub Actions
These integrations enable tight feedback loops between monitoring, triage, and fix cycles.
For example, Bugsnag can auto-create Jira tickets when new errors are detected, complete with stack traces and user impact details, making it easier for dev teams to prioritize and resolve bugs efficiently.
Fit Within Modern DevOps Workflows
New Relic is built to serve the broader DevOps and SRE ecosystem, tying together infrastructure, application performance, logs, and user experience into one unified platform.
Bugsnag, by contrast, is tightly focused on fitting into the developer’s daily workflow, prioritizing code-level error visibility and quick resolution with minimal operational overhead.
If your team spans both engineering and operations, New Relic provides an all-in-one view of system health.
If your primary goal is better insight into application crashes and improving app stability, Bugsnag is lean, focused, and easy to plug into your existing development tools.
New Relic vs Bugsnag: Pricing Overview
New Relic: Usage-Based, Transparent Pricing
Firstly, New Relic follows a usage-based pricing model, allowing teams to pay for what they use across data ingest and user seats.
There’s a generous free tier that includes:
100 GB/month of data ingest
1 Full User and unlimited Basic Users
Access to core features like APM, logs, dashboards, and alerts
As your monitoring needs scale, costs increase based on data volume and the number of Full Users.
This model is ideal for cloud-native teams who want full-stack observability with the flexibility to grow gradually.
Pro tip: New Relic is often more cost-effective for smaller teams or early-stage startups that want to explore full observability without large upfront commitments. However, high data volumes (e.g., from logs or infrastructure metrics) can lead to higher bills if not managed carefully.
Bugsnag: Tiered Plans Based on Events
Bugsnag uses a tiered pricing model based on the number of error events captured per month. It offers several plans:
Free Tier: Up to 7,500 events/month with basic features
Standard Plan: Scales up based on event volume, includes core integrations
Enterprise Plan: Custom pricing, advanced features like SSO, audit logs, and SLAs
This pricing model aligns well with teams that need granular error tracking without ingesting full observability data.
For startups and dev-focused teams that want to track crash frequency, user impact, and release stability, Bugsnag remains budget-friendly until error volumes grow significantly.
Fun fact: Because pricing is tied to error volume, Bugsnag encourages teams to improve application stability—not just track issues. Fewer errors can literally mean lower costs.
Startups vs Large Enterprises: Which is More Cost-Effective?
Startups and small teams might find Bugsnag more cost-effective if they’re solely focused on front-end and back-end error monitoring.
Growing teams or enterprises seeking broader observability—from infrastructure to UX—will benefit more from New Relic, even if it comes with a higher price tag at scale.
Ultimately, the right choice depends on how deep and wide your observability needs are—and whether error tracking or full-stack insights are your top priority.
New Relic vs Bugsnag: Use Case Suitability
✅ Choose New Relic If:
You want full observability across your stack
New Relic excels in providing a unified view of APM, infrastructure, logs, browser performance, and more—all from one dashboard.You need performance monitoring for backend, frontend, and infrastructure
With capabilities like distributed tracing, real user monitoring (RUM), synthetics, and custom dashboards, New Relic is built for end-to-end visibility.Your team includes DevOps/SREs focused on SLOs, traces, logs
If you’re setting SLOs, optimizing SLIs, or conducting root-cause analysis on production issues, New Relic’s rich telemetry and automation features are invaluable.
✅ Choose Bugsnag If:
Your primary need is error/crash tracking
Bugsnag is purpose-built to track and prioritize application errors, helping you identify the most impactful bugs in real-time.You want fast insights into app stability
With stability scores, error trends, and regression detection, Bugsnag empowers dev teams to quickly improve code health and monitor releases.You’re a dev team focusing on improving app quality and UX
Bugsnag is intuitive, lightweight, and deeply integrated into common dev workflows (like GitHub, Slack, and Jira), making it ideal for app-focused teams.
Both tools are powerful—but they’re optimized for different stages and needs of your development lifecycle.
Bugsnag keeps things laser-focused on app-level reliability while New Relic shines in complex, distributed environments.
New Relic vs Bugsnag: Pros and Cons Summary
New Relic Pros:
✅ Full-stack visibility
From backend performance to frontend user experience, infrastructure, and logs—New Relic offers unified observability in one platform.
✅ Rich data insights
Advanced features like distributed tracing, SLO monitoring, and anomaly detection provide deep visibility for DevOps and SRE teams.
❌ May be too complex for smaller teams
The wide array of features and dashboards can be overwhelming for small dev teams or those without dedicated ops support.
❌ Higher pricing at scale
New Relic’s usage-based model can become expensive as telemetry volume increases.
Bugsnag Pros:
✅ Excellent error diagnostics
Provides detailed reports on errors, their impact on users, and tools for tracking regressions and stability trends.
✅ Developer-centric
Designed with simplicity and usability in mind—great for agile teams looking to boost release quality without overhead.
❌ Limited observability scope
Focuses primarily on application-level errors; lacks features like infrastructure or full-stack monitoring.
❌ No built-in infrastructure metrics
You’ll need to pair it with another tool for deeper server or backend performance insights.
Final Verdict
When it comes to application monitoring and error tracking, New Relic and Bugsnag serve different—but often complementary—purposes.
New Relic excels in:
Providing comprehensive observability across your entire tech stack (APM, infrastructure, frontend, logs, traces)
Supporting DevOps and SRE teams with advanced alerting, dashboards, and SLOs
Scaling with complex environments across cloud-native and hybrid systems
However, its complexity and cost may not suit smaller teams with narrower goals.
Bugsnag stands out for:
Offering focused, developer-friendly error monitoring
Delivering quick insights into stability and crash trends
Enabling faster iteration and debugging for engineering teams
Yet, it lacks the broader telemetry capabilities of a full observability platform.
Our Recommendation:
Choose New Relic if your team needs end-to-end visibility and you’re invested in performance, uptime, and operational reliability.
Choose Bugsnag if you’re a developer-focused team prioritizing app quality, crash analytics, and efficient error resolution.
Use both together if your budget allows—New Relic for infrastructure and performance monitoring, and Bugsnag for deep-dive error tracking and developer experience.
Together, they can form a powerful observability stack tailored to both operational and engineering needs.
Conclusion
Choosing between New Relic and Bugsnag ultimately comes down to your team’s goals and the scope of observability you need.
If you’re looking for full-stack monitoring with real-time telemetry across applications, infrastructure, and frontend experiences, New Relic is a powerful option.
If your primary need is to monitor application errors, crashes, and stability, especially with a developer-first approach, Bugsnag is an excellent fit.
Both platforms offer free trials, making it easy to evaluate which one best aligns with your workflow and requirements.
For many teams, running both tools in parallel can deliver the best of both worlds—deep error diagnostics with Bugsnag, and holistic performance insight with New Relic.
Curious how New Relic compares to other tools?
Check out our guides on AppDynamics vs New Relic and Nagios vs New Relic.
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