New Relic vs Prometheus

New Relic vs Prometheus? Which is better for you?

As cloud-native architectures and microservices continue to dominate modern infrastructure, observability and monitoring have become critical for maintaining system reliability and performance.

Without the right tools, diagnosing bottlenecks, detecting outages, and ensuring seamless user experiences can become overwhelming.

In this post, we’ll explore two popular monitoring solutions — New Relic and Prometheus.

New Relic offers a comprehensive, full-stack observability platform with deep application performance monitoring (APM), infrastructure visibility, and real-time user tracking.

Prometheus, part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), is an open-source monitoring system widely adopted for its powerful time-series data capabilities and its integration with Kubernetes and cloud-native environments.

This article will dive into their key differences, strengths, and ideal use cases, helping you make an informed decision based on your organization’s specific needs.

Whether you’re a DevOps engineer seeking powerful infrastructure metrics or a developer looking for end-to-end application insights, you’ll find this comparison valuable.

Along the way, we’ll also reference related posts like New Relic vs LogicMonitor and Sumo Logic vs New Relic for even deeper context on monitoring tool options.

What is New Relic?

New Relic is a leading SaaS-based observability platform designed to provide full-stack visibility across applications, infrastructure, and user experiences.

It helps organizations monitor, analyze, and optimize the performance of their entire technology stack — from backend services to frontend user interactions.

Key offerings within New Relic’s platform include:

• Application Performance Monitoring (APM): Real-time visibility into application code, transactions, database calls, and external services to quickly detect and fix performance bottlenecks.

• Infrastructure Monitoring: Track the health and performance of servers, cloud services (like AWS, Azure, and GCP), containers, and Kubernetes clusters.

• Log Management: Unified log ingestion and querying capabilities, enabling quick correlation between application and infrastructure events.

• Synthetic Monitoring: Simulate user interactions and API calls to proactively detect issues before users are impacted.

• Real User Monitoring (RUM): Analyze real user interactions to measure page load times, user satisfaction (via Apdex scores), and frontend performance.

As a fully managed SaaS solution, New Relic removes the operational burden of maintaining your own observability stack.

Users can start monitoring with minimal setup, and the platform automatically scales to meet enterprise demands.

If you want to learn more about how New Relic compares against other observability platforms, check out our posts on New Relic vs LogicMonitor and Sumo Logic vs New Relic.

What is Prometheus?

Prometheus is a powerful open-source monitoring and alerting toolkit, originally developed at SoundCloud and now part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

It has become one of the most popular choices for organizations that want a self-hosted, highly flexible monitoring solution.

This is especially in cloud-native and Kubernetes environments.

Key features of Prometheus include:

• Time-Series Database (TSDB): Prometheus stores all metrics data in a custom time-series database, optimized for fast retrieval and efficient storage.

• Flexible Querying with PromQL: Prometheus Query Language (PromQL) allows for powerful, real-time queries and aggregations across metric data, supporting complex alerting and dashboard use cases.

• Alerting: Prometheus integrates with the Alertmanager component to handle alerts based on metric thresholds, and can route notifications to systems like Slack, PagerDuty, or email.

• Integrations: While Prometheus provides raw metric collection and querying, it pairs seamlessly with visualization tools like Grafana to create rich, customizable dashboards.

• Self-Hosted Model: Unlike New Relic’s SaaS approach, Prometheus is designed to be deployed and managed by your own teams, giving you full control over data retention, scaling, and configuration.

Prometheus is particularly well-suited for environments that favor openness, extensibility, and fine-grained control over how observability infrastructure is managed.

If you’re interested in other monitoring solutions that work well alongside Prometheus, you might also like our posts on Grafana vs Tableau and Datadog vs Grafana.

New Relic vs Prometheus: Feature Comparison

When comparing New Relic and Prometheus, it’s important to understand that they approach observability from fundamentally different angles — managed SaaS vs. self-hosted open-source — which influences their feature sets.

Key Differences:

• Ease of Setup: New Relic is quicker to deploy out-of-the-box, while Prometheus needs more upfront infrastructure setup.

• Customization: Prometheus offers total flexibility but at the cost of more manual work. New Relic offers polished experiences with less required maintenance.

• Scalability: New Relic’s SaaS platform handles scaling automatically. With Prometheus, scaling often involves setting up federation or long-term storage integrations (e.g., with Thanos or Cortex).

• Cost: Prometheus itself is free, but costs arise from hosting and managing the infrastructure. New Relic has clear pricing for data ingestion but can become costly at scale.

If you’re also evaluating other observability tools, you might find our comparisons like New Relic vs LogicMonitor or Sumo Logic vs New Relic helpful.

New Relic vs Prometheus: Core Strengths Comparison

Both New Relic and Prometheus are powerful in their own right.

However, they shine in different environments depending on your needs.

New Relic Strengths

• End-to-End Observability:
  New Relic provides full visibility into applications, infrastructure, user experience, and logs in a single platform.

• Out-of-the-Box Dashboards:
  Pre-built dashboards for popular frameworks, services, and infrastructures enable teams to gain insights quickly with minimal setup.

• Easy Scaling:
  Since New Relic is SaaS-based, it automatically handles data storage growth, ingestion spikes, and user scaling without any manual intervention.

• Integrated Alerting and AI:
  New Relic’s Applied Intelligence (AI) helps detect anomalies, prioritize incidents, and reduce alert fatigue.

If you’re looking for a more turnkey solution without the burden of infrastructure management, New Relic can be a strong choice.

Prometheus Strengths

• Flexibility and Customization:
  Prometheus lets you define exactly how you want to collect, store, and query your monitoring data using its flexible PromQL language.

• Powerful for Kubernetes and Cloud-Native Environments:
  Prometheus is the de-facto monitoring standard in Kubernetes clusters, with deep native integration.

• Cost-Effective for DIY Setups:
  Being open-source, Prometheus itself is free. This can significantly reduce software licensing costs, especially for technically capable teams.

• Vendor Neutrality:
  No lock-in to a proprietary platform — Prometheus can be extended or migrated as needed.

If you prefer complete control over your monitoring setup and are willing to manage the operational overhead, Prometheus may be the better fit.

Ease of Deployment and Management

Choosing between New Relic and Prometheus often comes down to how much effort your team can invest in setup and ongoing management.

New Relic

• Simple Agent-Based Installation:
  New Relic offers agents for many languages (Java, Node.js, Python, etc.), infrastructure monitoring agents, and integrations with cloud services — all designed for quick deployment.

• Fully Managed Backend and UI:
  New Relic’s SaaS model means that users don’t have to worry about storage, upgrades, scaling, or maintenance. Everything from data ingestion to dashboarding is handled by New Relic’s cloud.

• Fast Time to Value:
  Most organizations can start seeing useful metrics and traces within minutes after setup.

New Relic is ideal for teams that want to minimize operational overhead.

It’s also good for focus more on observability insights rather than infrastructure management.

Prometheus

• Manual Installation and Configuration:
  Deploying Prometheus involves setting up servers (or pods in Kubernetes), configuring scrape targets, tuning retention policies, and managing storage backends.

• Requires Managing Storage and Backups:
  Since Prometheus stores time-series data locally, you must plan for data persistence, backups, and possibly remote storage solutions (like Thanos or Cortex) for scaling.

• High Availability Needs Extra Work:
  Native Prometheus is a single-server system; achieving high availability requires running multiple instances and managing replication and federation manually.

Prometheus provides full control but at the cost of significant operational responsibility.

This makes it better suited for teams with strong DevOps expertise.

New Relic vs Prometheus: Pricing Overview

Understanding the cost implications is crucial when deciding between New Relic and Prometheus, especially as your monitoring needs scale.

New Relic

• Free Tier Available:
  New Relic offers a generous free tier that includes a limited amount of data ingestion per month and access for a small number of users, making it a good starting point for small teams or proof-of-concepts.

• Paid Plans Based on Data Volume and User Seats:
  New Relic’s pricing grows based on how much telemetry data (logs, metrics, traces) you ingest and how many full-access users you add. While this provides flexibility, costs can escalate quickly in large environments or under heavy workloads.

• Predictable SaaS Billing:
  Since New Relic is fully managed, the pricing covers infrastructure, scaling, upgrades, and support, eliminating hidden operational costs.

Prometheus

• Open-Source and Free:
  Prometheus itself is completely free to use under the Apache 2.0 license. There are no licensing fees for the software.

• Operational and Scaling Costs if Self-Hosted:
  However, deploying Prometheus at scale comes with hidden costs: hardware, storage, cloud instances, maintenance time, and engineering effort for HA (high availability) and durability.
  Using solutions like Thanos or Cortex for large-scale Prometheus deployments introduces additional infrastructure and complexity, which can add significant operational expenses.

In short: New Relic offers simplified billing but at a premium.

Prometheus reduces software costs but can introduce substantial operational burdens as monitoring needs grow.

New Relic vs Prometheus: Integrations and Ecosystem

Both New Relic and Prometheus offer powerful integration capabilities, but they serve different styles of environments and user needs.

New Relic

• Broad Cloud Provider Support:
  New Relic offers native integrations with major cloud platforms like AWS, Azure, and GCP, making it easy to monitor infrastructure, services, and applications in cloud-native environments.

• Kubernetes Monitoring:
  New Relic provides Kubernetes cluster explorer features, offering visualizations and real-time telemetry for containerized environments.

• CI/CD and DevOps Tools:
  Integration with popular tools like Jenkins, GitHub Actions, CircleCI, and Terraform enables seamless DevOps workflows and performance monitoring in continuous delivery pipelines.

• Third-Party Applications:
  Extensive marketplace for quick integrations with databases, SaaS applications, message queues, and serverless functions.

Prometheus

• Massive Open-Source Ecosystem:
  As a CNCF graduate project, Prometheus enjoys robust community support with countless exporters (plugins) available for monitoring databases, operating systems, messaging systems, hardware metrics, and more.

• Native Kubernetes Integration:
  Prometheus was essentially built for cloud-native environments. It integrates deeply with Kubernetes, scraping metrics from pods, nodes, and services using service discovery mechanisms.

• Visualization with Grafana:
  Although Prometheus has a basic web UI, most users pair it with Grafana for rich dashboards and advanced visualizations. This combination provides a flexible and customizable monitoring stack.

• Alerting with Alertmanager:
  Prometheus works with Alertmanager to handle alert notifications via email, PagerDuty, Slack, and other channels.

Summary:
New Relic offers a polished, managed integration experience across enterprise software stacks. Prometheus shines in open-source ecosystems, with maximum flexibility and extensibility for cloud-native environments.

New Relic vs Prometheus: Pros and Cons

Choosing between New Relic and Prometheus often comes down to your organization’s needs around management, customization, and scalability.

Here’s a side-by-side look at the strengths and limitations of each platform:

New Relic Pros

Managed Service with Minimal Maintenance:
With New Relic, there’s no need to manage servers, storage, or scaling — everything is handled through a fully managed SaaS model.

Powerful APM, Synthetics, and RUM Features:
New Relic shines with out-of-the-box capabilities like Application Performance Monitoring (APM), synthetic monitoring for uptime checks, and Real User Monitoring (RUM) for frontend performance insights.

Excellent Support and Documentation:
Comprehensive documentation, onboarding tutorials, and enterprise-grade customer support make New Relic ideal for teams that need fast ramp-up times.

New Relic Cons

❌ Can Become Expensive at Scale:
New Relic’s pricing, based on data ingestion and number of users, can quickly escalate in larger environments or for organizations that collect high cardinality telemetry.

❌ Less Flexibility for Highly Custom Setups:
While New Relic covers most enterprise use cases, highly specialized or unconventional monitoring needs might be harder to implement compared to open-source solutions.

Prometheus Pros

Open-Source and Free:
Prometheus is completely free to use under the Apache 2.0 license, making it extremely cost-effective — especially for startups and tech-savvy organizations.

Highly Customizable Metrics Collection:
Prometheus allows you to define exactly what to collect, how to collect it, and how to store/query it, offering unmatched flexibility with PromQL.

Native Integration with Kubernetes:
Designed for dynamic cloud-native environments, Prometheus integrates seamlessly with Kubernetes clusters without needing heavy third-party adaptations.

Prometheus Cons

❌ Requires Significant Operational Overhead:
You’ll need to handle installation, scaling, storage management, HA setups, upgrades, and backup strategies manually (or via add-ons like Thanos or Cortex).

❌ Not Ideal for Deep APM without Extra Tools:
Prometheus focuses on metrics. Deep transaction tracing, distributed tracing, and application performance monitoring (APM) typically require pairing it with other tools like Jaeger, Tempo, or OpenTelemetry.

When to Choose New Relic vs Prometheus

Choosing between New Relic and Prometheus largely depends on your organization’s expertise, scalability needs, and operational philosophy.

Here’s a quick guide:

Choose New Relic if:

• 🚀 You want a fully managed, turnkey observability platform:
  New Relic handles the heavy lifting — no need to worry about setting up storage, scaling monitoring infrastructure, or maintaining uptime of your observability stack.

• 🎯 Your priority is APM, distributed tracing, RUM, and advanced analytics:
  If your focus is on deep application insights, end-user experience tracking, and rich, real-time analytics across the entire stack, New Relic provides a ready-to-use, enterprise-grade solution.

• 🛡️ You require enterprise support and compliance certifications:
  New Relic offers professional support, SLAs, and a range of compliance standards for regulated industries.

Choose Prometheus if:

• 🛠️ You have a skilled DevOps/SRE team:
  Prometheus requires hands-on management, customization, and scaling — best suited for teams comfortable with running, troubleshooting, and maintaining open-source infrastructure.

• 🌐 You need flexible, scalable infrastructure monitoring without vendor lock-in:
  Prometheus is highly portable and can be integrated into almost any environment, from Kubernetes clusters to bare-metal servers, offering full control over your observability stack.

• 💸 You’re optimizing for cost and customization:
  Especially for organizations with large-scale monitoring needs and technical expertise, Prometheus offers a cost-effective and flexible alternative to SaaS solutions.

Conclusion

Choosing between New Relic and Prometheus ultimately comes down to your team’s expertise, your monitoring goals, and your budget.

New Relic offers a fully managed, powerful observability platform that is ideal for teams who need quick setup, full-stack insights, and enterprise-grade features like APM, RUM, and synthetics.

It’s a strong choice if you want minimal maintenance overhead and are willing to invest in a commercial solution.

Prometheus, on the other hand, is a flexible, open-source monitoring system that shines in highly customized, infrastructure-heavy environments.

It’s the go-to for teams who prefer open standards, seek to avoid vendor lock-in.

It’s also good to have the technical ability to manage their own monitoring stack.

When deciding between the two:

• Consider your team’s skills (Do you have the DevOps expertise to manage Prometheus?)

• Evaluate your budget (Are you prepared for the licensing costs of New Relic or the operational costs of Prometheus?)

• Understand your observability needs (Are you monitoring primarily applications, infrastructure, or both?)

Whenever possible, take advantage of free trials, open-source pilots, or even consider a hybrid approach — some teams use Prometheus for infrastructure metrics and New Relic for APM and user experience monitoring to get the best of both worlds.