New Relic vs Splunk

New Relic vs Splunk? Which is better for you?

In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, observability and real-time analytics are essential pillars of modern DevOps and IT operations.

From detecting performance bottlenecks to ensuring security compliance, having full visibility across your infrastructure, applications, and logs can be the difference between proactive action and costly downtime.

Two of the most prominent platforms in this space are New Relic and Splunk.

Both offer comprehensive tools for application monitoring, infrastructure visibility, and log analytics—but they cater to slightly different needs and user personas.

In this post, we’ll do a detailed side-by-side comparison of New Relic vs Splunk, helping you decide which platform fits best depending on your organization’s size, goals, and technical maturity.

We’ll explore their core features, pricing models, ease of use, and ideal use cases.

For more on similar comparisons, you might also be interested in:

• New Relic vs Datadog

• Dynatrace vs New Relic

• Datadog vs Grafana

Let’s dive into what makes each of these tools unique—and which one might be right for your stack.

New Relic vs Splunk: Platform Overview

New Relic

Firstly, New Relic has come a long way since its origins as a pure APM (Application Performance Monitoring) provider.

With the launch of New Relic One, the platform evolved into a full-stack observability solution.

It now offers unified visibility into applications, infrastructure, logs, browser/user interactions, and even synthetics.

Key capabilities of New Relic include:

• APM (Application Performance Monitoring) for detailed application telemetry

• Infrastructure monitoring with real-time performance data

• Log management integrated directly with other observability tools

• Synthetics monitoring for simulating user interactions and availability testing

• Custom dashboards and alerting to visualize metrics and stay ahead of incidents

Notably, New Relic has embraced OpenTelemetry, positioning itself as an OpenTelemetry-native observability platform.

This ensures easy data ingestion and flexibility in modern, cloud-native environments.

Splunk

Splunk started with a strong focus on log analysis and has grown into a broader analytics and observability ecosystem.

It remains especially dominant in the SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) space, thanks to its robust search capabilities and security-focused tooling.

Splunk’s offerings include:

• Splunk Enterprise for powerful, on-premise log analytics

• Splunk Cloud Platform for scalable cloud-based data ingestion and search

• Splunk Observability Cloud for infrastructure monitoring, APM, and RUM

• Security analytics tools for threat detection, compliance, and incident response

Splunk is especially valued for its flexible data ingestion model and ability to derive insights from diverse machine data, making it a favorite among large enterprises and security teams.

New Relic vs Splunk: Core Feature Comparison

When evaluating New Relic vs Splunk, it’s important to break down their core features side by side to understand how each platform supports observability, performance monitoring, and analytics.

Summary

• New Relic excels in APM, real-time infrastructure monitoring, and user-centric features like RUM and synthetics.

• Splunk leads in log analytics, enterprise-scale SIEM, and deep customization for security-heavy environments.

For more in-depth breakdowns on similar comparisons, check out our articles on New Relic vs Datadog and Kibana vs Sumo Logic.

New Relic vs Splunk: Ease of Use & Deployment

When choosing between New Relic and Splunk, ease of deployment and day-to-day usability can significantly influence team productivity—especially for smaller teams or organizations without dedicated observability engineers.

Agent Installation and Configuration

• New Relic offers a straightforward setup process, with a unified New Relic One agent that supports multiple languages and environments. It integrates quickly with cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and GCP, and its guided install CLI makes onboarding fast for most modern stacks.

• Splunk, on the other hand, typically requires more initial configuration. While Splunk Universal Forwarder and Heavy Forwarder agents offer flexibility, setup can be more involved—especially when self-hosting Splunk Enterprise or managing complex data pipelines. For cloud-native setups, Splunk Observability Cloud simplifies this somewhat, but still leans technical.

UI/UX Comparison

• New Relic is praised for its modern, intuitive UI. With easy-to-navigate dashboards, contextual drill-downs, and a consistent user experience across APM, infrastructure, and logs, teams can ramp up quickly.

• Splunk’s interface is powerful but can feel more utilitarian. The Search Processing Language (SPL) enables fine-grained control over queries and dashboards, but has a steeper learning curve. Advanced users love its power, but it may be intimidating for newcomers.

Learning Curve for Engineers and Analysts

• New Relic is generally considered easier for developers, SREs, and DevOps teams to adopt—especially due to its OpenTelemetry-native support, detailed documentation, and strong community support.

• Splunk requires more training, particularly in mastering SPL and navigating more advanced use cases like SIEM and threat intelligence. However, analysts and security teams often prefer Splunk for the depth and flexibility it provides once that skill is developed.

Summary

• Choose New Relic if you want a fast, intuitive setup with broad observability coverage and developer-friendly tooling.

• Opt for Splunk if you have experienced analysts, need robust search capabilities, or plan to integrate security analytics deeply into your workflows.

Interested in more tool comparisons? Check out our recent post on Dynatrace vs New Relic or explore Grafana vs Kibana for visualization insights.

New Relic vs Splunk: Performance & Scalability

In modern observability and IT operations, performance and scalability are critical—especially when monitoring thousands of services or analyzing terabytes of log data daily.

Let’s see how New Relic and Splunk compare in this area.

Real-Time Data Ingestion and Analytics Performance

• New Relic is built with real-time telemetry in mind. Using its telemetry data platform, it ingests metrics, events, logs, and traces at scale with low latency. Data becomes available for analysis in near real-time, allowing engineers to respond quickly to performance anomalies or incidents.

• Splunk, traditionally strong in log analytics, also handles real-time ingestion well—especially with Splunk Cloud and Splunk Observability Cloud. However, depending on the deployment model (especially self-hosted), there can be some overhead in indexing, particularly under heavy or unoptimized data loads.

Scalability for Large Enterprise Environments

• Splunk is known for its scalability and is widely adopted in large enterprises. Splunk Enterprise can handle petabytes of data, and Splunk’s distributed architecture supports large-scale ingestion, storage, and querying. It’s particularly suited for complex, high-volume environments.

• New Relic also scales efficiently, particularly for cloud-native environments. Its usage-based pricing model and cloud-hosted architecture make it flexible for scaling up and down. However, very large enterprises may require fine-tuning to optimize cost-effectiveness as ingestion volume increases.

Cloud-Native Capabilities and Multi-Cloud Support

• New Relic is cloud-native by design and provides seamless integrations with AWS, Azure, GCP, and Kubernetes. It supports distributed, containerized, and serverless environments out of the box—making it ideal for DevOps and SRE teams in modern cloud-native stacks.

• Splunk, originally built for on-premise log analysis, has made significant strides in the cloud-native space. Splunk Observability Cloud provides capabilities tailored to modern stacks and supports multi-cloud deployments, but it may still lag slightly behind New Relic in terms of ease and automation in cloud-native environments.

Summary

• Choose New Relic for:

  • Real-time, full-stack observability

  • Seamless multi-cloud and Kubernetes support

  • Developer-centric, cloud-native telemetry pipelines

• Choose Splunk for:

  • Enterprise-grade log ingestion and analytics

  • Robust scalability for hybrid/on-premise architectures

  • Deep search and historical data analysis

For deeper context on scalability strategies in cloud-native observability, check out our post on Kubernetes Scale Deployment and Optimizing Kubernetes Resource Limits.

New Relic vs Splunk: Ecosystem & Integrations

When choosing an observability platform, its ability to integrate seamlessly with your existing toolchain and infrastructure is crucial.

Here’s how New Relic and Splunk compare in terms of ecosystem and integrations.

Integrations with Third-Party Tools and Platforms

• New Relic offers a rich catalog of over 500 integrations via its New Relic Instant Observability (I/O) hub. This includes popular CI/CD tools (Jenkins, GitHub Actions), monitoring stacks (Prometheus, Grafana), databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL), and messaging systems (Kafka, RabbitMQ).

• Splunk also has an extensive ecosystem, particularly through its Splunkbase marketplace. It provides add-ons and apps for integration with ITSM tools (like ServiceNow), firewalls, operating systems, and various SaaS and security tools. Its strong presence in SIEM and security analytics also gives it a broader security-focused integration landscape.

Cloud Provider Integrations (AWS, Azure, GCP)

• New Relic integrates tightly with AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. With out-of-the-box dashboards and telemetry streaming, users can monitor cloud services like Lambda, EC2, GKE, and Azure Functions within minutes.

• Splunk offers robust integrations with major cloud platforms as well, especially for log ingestion and security posture monitoring. However, configuring cloud integrations may involve more manual setup and customization depending on your deployment (Splunk Cloud vs. on-prem Splunk Enterprise).

Community and Support Resources

• New Relic maintains a highly active community forum, robust official documentation, and learning center. Additionally, the New Relic Explorers Hub encourages peer collaboration and solution sharing.

• Splunk has a large, mature user community, especially among enterprise IT and security professionals. Splunk Answers and Splunk Docs are key resources, and their annual .conf events are among the biggest in the observability and security world.

Summary

If your stack is heavily cloud-native, New Relic’s OpenTelemetry support and plug-and-play experience may be more appealing.

For hybrid environments or security-driven workflows, Splunk’s broad plugin ecosystem is hard to beat.

New Relic vs Splunk: Pricing Comparison

Understanding how each platform charges for usage is critical—especially when monitoring costs can scale quickly in enterprise environments.

Here’s a breakdown of how New Relic and Splunk structure their pricing models, and how that impacts cost efficiency depending on your use case.

New Relic: Transparent Usage-Based Pricing

New Relic uses a telemetry-based pricing model, which makes costs more predictable and scalable for modern DevOps teams. Users are billed based on:

• Data ingest volume (GB/month)

• User types (basic, core, full platform access)

• Add-ons such as synthetic monitoring or advanced AI features

New Relic’s free tier includes:

• 100 GB of ingest per month

• One full user and unlimited basic users

This model is ideal for:

• Startups and small teams that want to avoid per-host billing

• Teams with spiky or unpredictable workloads

• Developers who prefer to pay only for what they use

For more pricing info, check the official New Relic pricing page.

Splunk: Tiered Pricing with Ingestion Caps

Splunk traditionally follows a tiered pricing model based on daily data ingestion volume or infrastructure-based metrics. Key characteristics include:

• Pricing tiers based on data volume (e.g., 5 GB/day, 10 GB/day)

• Option for predictive pricing and volume discounts

• Splunk Enterprise and Splunk Cloud have different models, with the cloud version offering more managed services

This approach can become expensive at scale, especially for log-heavy environments without tight controls on data volumes. However, Splunk’s pricing can be negotiated with enterprise-level agreements.

For details, refer to Splunk’s pricing overview.

Cost Efficiency for Different Use Cases

Summary

• New Relic wins on transparency and flexibility, particularly for teams who value usage-based billing and predictable costs.

• Splunk remains competitive for large enterprises with high-volume ingestion needs and custom pricing agreements.

New Relic vs Splunk: Use Case Suitability

Choosing between New Relic and Splunk depends largely on your team’s goals, infrastructure needs, and budget preferences.

Below is a breakdown of when each platform excels.

✅ When to Choose New Relic

• You need full-stack observability
  New Relic provides a unified view of application performance, infrastructure, browser, and synthetic monitoring—all in one place.

• You prefer OpenTelemetry-native platforms
  As a strong supporter of OpenTelemetry, New Relic simplifies integration and future-proofs your observability investments.

• You want predictable, usage-based pricing
  With its transparent, data-ingestion-based pricing, New Relic is especially attractive for startups, SMBs, or anyone managing fluctuating workloads.

✅ When to Choose Splunk

• Your organization is security-focused
  Splunk is a leader in SIEM and security analytics, making it ideal for teams with strict compliance and threat detection requirements.

• You require advanced log analytics and SIEM
  Splunk’s mature platform is built around robust log ingestion, search, and correlation—perfect for troubleshooting complex infrastructure and security events.

• You need historical data analysis at scale
  If your team relies on long-term storage and deep forensic analysis of logs, Splunk’s architecture and tooling are designed for large-scale, historical data workloads.

New Relic vs Splunk: Pros and Cons Summary

When comparing New Relic and Splunk, both platforms bring significant strengths to the table—but they also come with trade-offs depending on your organization’s priorities.

New Relic

✅ Full-stack observability
From APM and infrastructure monitoring to synthetics and browser performance, New Relic offers a comprehensive observability solution.

✅ Developer-friendly with OpenTelemetry
Its OpenTelemetry-native approach makes it easy for modern DevOps teams to instrument applications without vendor lock-in.

❌ Limited security features
While New Relic provides observability, it doesn’t offer advanced SIEM or threat detection like Splunk.

❌ May lack depth for compliance-heavy use cases
For organizations with stringent compliance and auditing requirements, New Relic may not meet all needs without third-party integrations.

Splunk

✅ Powerful log analytics and SIEM
Splunk is unmatched when it comes to log data analysis, security event correlation, and compliance visibility.

✅ Highly customizable dashboards
Users can build advanced dashboards tailored to complex environments and operational needs.

❌ Complex pricing
Splunk’s tiered pricing model—especially with ingestion-based costs—can quickly become expensive for high-volume environments.

❌ Steeper learning curve
While flexible and powerful, Splunk can be overwhelming for teams without prior experience or dedicated admins.

New Relic vs Splunk: Final Verdict

Summary of Major Differentiators

At a high level, New Relic and Splunk serve different—yet sometimes overlapping—observability needs:

• New Relic excels in application performance monitoring (APM), infrastructure observability, and developer-centric workflows, making it an ideal choice for product teams and modern DevOps practices.

• Splunk is the go-to platform for log-centric analytics, security monitoring, and compliance-heavy environments, favored by IT operations and security teams.

Platform Alignment by Organizational Needs

Recommendation Based on Scale, Team, and Goals

• Choose New Relic if you want:

  • A streamlined, OpenTelemetry-native observability platform

  • Transparent, usage-based pricing

  • A strong APM and infrastructure monitoring suite for DevOps

• Choose Splunk if you:

  • Need enterprise-grade log analytics and SIEM

  • Require long-term historical data analysis

  • Have a dedicated operations or security team to manage the platform’s complexity

In many cases, organizations may even choose to use both—New Relic for performance monitoring and Splunk for log-heavy security and compliance needs.

Conclusion

Both New Relic and Splunk are powerful tools in the observability and analytics space, each with its own strengths:

• New Relic shines with its modern, full-stack observability, OpenTelemetry-native support, and developer-friendly interface—making it an excellent choice for DevOps, SREs, and cloud-native teams.

• Splunk leads in log analysis, SIEM capabilities, and long-term data retention, which makes it particularly valuable for security teams and enterprises with complex compliance requirements.

Ultimately, the right choice comes down to your team’s priorities, technical maturity, and monitoring goals.

If you’re focused on application performance and ease of integration, New Relic is a great fit.

If your organization demands advanced log correlation and threat detection, Splunk may be the better option.

For deeper dives, check out their official docs:

• New Relic Documentation

• Splunk Documentation

Want to explore more observability comparisons? Check out our other posts like New Relic vs Datadog or Dynatrace vs New Relic.