Open Source New Relic Alternatives 2026
New Relic's Usage-Based Pricing Creates Unpredictable Bills
New Relic moved to consumption-based pricing in 2023 and has refined it since, but the core problem remains: costs are difficult to predict and easy to overshoot.
Here is what New Relic charges in 2026:
| Component | Price |
|---|---|
| Data ingest (free tier) | 100 GB/month included |
| Data ingest (overage) | $0.35/GB |
| Full Platform user | $49/user/month (Standard) |
| Full Platform user | $349/user/month (Pro) |
| Full Platform user | $549/user/month (Enterprise) |
| Core user | $49/user/month (Pro) |
| Basic user | Free |
The 100 GB free tier sounds generous until you instrument a moderately sized microservices deployment. A typical 20-service application with APM, infrastructure monitoring, and log forwarding generates 15-30 GB of telemetry data per day. That is 450-900 GB per month — $122-$280 in overage charges alone, before adding a single paid user seat.
The real issue is predictability. Teams report bills spiking 3-5x during incidents, deployments, or traffic surges. A Black Friday event that doubles request volume can triple your New Relic bill because every additional span, log line, and metric data point counts toward ingest. There is no cap, no circuit breaker. You find out next month.
Data retention adds another constraint. Standard retention is 8 days for most data types. Extending to 30 or 90 days requires additional storage costs. If you need to investigate an issue from three weeks ago, you may have already lost the data.
Self-hosting your observability stack eliminates per-GB and per-user pricing entirely. Your cost is fixed infrastructure — the same VPS bill whether you ingest 100 GB or 2 TB in a month.
TL;DR
SigNoz is the most direct New Relic replacement — a single platform covering APM, logs, metrics, and traces with a Datadog-like UI built natively on OpenTelemetry. For teams already running Kubernetes, the Grafana + Prometheus + Loki stack is the industry standard with the largest community. OpenObserve offers the lowest resource footprint for log-heavy workloads. Uptrace provides a polished tracing-first experience for smaller teams. HyperDX unifies logs, traces, and session replays in a single timeline for debugging production issues fast.
Key Takeaways
- SigNoz (19K+ GitHub stars) is the closest feature match to New Relic — single binary, ClickHouse-backed, with built-in dashboards for APM, traces, logs, and metrics. OpenTelemetry-native from day one.
- Grafana + Prometheus + Loki is the most battle-tested stack, used by thousands of companies at scale. Steeper setup, but each component is the best in its class.
- OpenObserve (14K+ stars) ingests logs, metrics, and traces with 140x lower storage costs than Elasticsearch. Written in Rust, deploys as a single binary.
- Uptrace (3.5K+ stars) focuses on distributed tracing with ClickHouse storage. Strongest option for teams that primarily need trace analysis with metrics as a complement.
- HyperDX (7K+ stars) correlates logs, traces, metrics, and session replays in a unified timeline. Best for full-stack debugging when you need to connect frontend errors to backend traces.
- Self-hosting at 500 GB/month of telemetry costs $50-200/month in infrastructure vs $175-$2,000+/month on New Relic depending on user count and data volume.
- OpenTelemetry is the migration path — instrument once with OTel, then swap backends without touching application code. All five alternatives support it natively.
Quick Comparison
| Feature | New Relic | SigNoz | Grafana Stack | OpenObserve | Uptrace | HyperDX |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| License | Proprietary | AGPL-3.0 | Apache 2.0 / AGPL | Apache 2.0 | BSL / AGPL | AGPL-3.0 |
| Self-Host Difficulty | N/A (SaaS) | Low | Medium-High | Low | Low | Low-Medium |
| Docker Support | N/A | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Kubernetes Support | N/A | Helm chart | Helm charts | Helm chart | Helm chart | Helm chart |
| APM | Yes | Yes | Tempo + Grafana | Basic | Yes | Yes |
| Logs | Yes | Yes | Loki | Yes (primary) | Yes | Yes |
| Metrics | Yes | Yes | Prometheus | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Traces | Yes | Yes | Tempo | Yes | Yes (primary) | Yes |
| OpenTelemetry Native | Partial | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Session Replay | Yes | No | Faro (basic) | No | No | Yes |
| Alerting | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Active Development | Commercial | Weekly | Weekly | Weekly | Monthly | Weekly |
| GitHub Stars | N/A | 19K+ | 65K+ (Grafana) | 14K+ | 3.5K+ | 7K+ |
Pricing: New Relic vs Self-Hosted Observability
The financial case for self-hosting depends on data volume and team size. Here is a direct comparison across three scenarios:
| Scenario | New Relic Annual Cost | Self-Hosted Annual Cost | Annual Savings |
|---|---|---|---|
| Small (200 GB/mo, 3 full users) | $2,184 ($420 ingest + $1,764 users) | $600-1,200 (single VPS) | $984-1,584 |
| Medium (1 TB/mo, 8 full users) | $7,884 ($3,780 ingest + $4,704 users) | $2,400-4,800 (3-node cluster) | $3,084-5,484 |
| Large (5 TB/mo, 20 full users) | $29,400 ($20,580 ingest + $11,760 users) | $6,000-12,000 (dedicated cluster) | $17,400-23,400 |
New Relic cost calculations: $0.35/GB over 100 GB free tier, $49/user/month Standard. Self-hosted costs assume commodity cloud pricing (Hetzner, DigitalOcean, or equivalent) for compute, storage, and bandwidth. The small scenario runs SigNoz or OpenObserve on a single 8 GB VPS. The medium scenario uses a 3-node ClickHouse or Prometheus cluster. The large scenario requires dedicated storage-optimized instances.
The break-even point is roughly 150 GB/month with 2+ paid users. Below that, New Relic's free tier is hard to beat. Above it, the gap widens every month.
Infrastructure cost is fixed regardless of traffic spikes. A production incident that generates 10x normal log volume does not 10x your bill — it just uses more disk space on servers you already control.
SigNoz — Closest Full Replacement for New Relic
SigNoz is the most direct open source equivalent to New Relic. It provides APM, distributed tracing, log management, metrics, dashboards, and alerting in a single platform — no stitching together separate tools.
Built on ClickHouse for storage and OpenTelemetry for data collection, SigNoz accepts traces, metrics, and logs through the OTel protocol natively. There is no proprietary agent. You instrument your applications with standard OpenTelemetry SDKs, point the exporter at SigNoz, and get service maps, latency breakdowns, error rates, and log correlation out of the box.
The UI is SigNoz's strongest asset for teams migrating from New Relic. Dashboards show RED metrics (rate, errors, duration) per service, trace flamegraphs with span-level detail, and log search with attribute filtering. The experience feels closer to New Relic or Datadog than the Grafana stack, which requires assembling dashboards from scratch.
Setup: Single Docker Compose command deploys SigNoz with ClickHouse, the OTel Collector, and the query service. Kubernetes deployment uses an official Helm chart. Minimum requirements: 4 vCPU, 8 GB RAM, 50 GB SSD for small deployments handling up to 50 GB/day.
Limitations: No session replay or real user monitoring. The alerting system is functional but less mature than Grafana's. The managed cloud option (SigNoz Cloud) is available but has its own pricing — evaluate it if you want the software without the infrastructure overhead.
For teams already exploring Datadog alternatives, SigNoz covers the same ground — our Datadog alternatives comparison includes a deeper look at SigNoz's architecture.
Grafana + Prometheus + Loki — The Industry Standard Stack
The Grafana observability stack is the most widely deployed open source monitoring platform in production. It assembles best-in-class components for each telemetry type:
| Component | Role | Replaces in New Relic |
|---|---|---|
| Prometheus | Metrics collection and storage | Infrastructure metrics, custom metrics |
| Loki | Log aggregation | Log management |
| Tempo | Distributed tracing | Distributed tracing, APM |
| Grafana | Dashboards and visualization | Dashboards, alerting UI |
| Alloy | Telemetry collector | New Relic agent |
The stack's strength is maturity. Prometheus alone has 56K+ GitHub stars and is a CNCF graduated project. Every major cloud provider, CI/CD tool, and database exposes Prometheus metrics natively. Loki indexes log metadata rather than full text, keeping storage costs dramatically lower than Elasticsearch-based solutions. Tempo provides distributed tracing with deep Grafana integration.
Setup complexity is the trade-off. You deploy and configure each component separately. A production-grade stack requires Prometheus for metrics, Loki for logs, Tempo for traces, Grafana for visualization, and Alloy or the OTel Collector for data routing. Each has its own configuration, scaling model, and storage backend.
For a detailed walkthrough of deploying this stack, see our Grafana + Prometheus + Loki self-hosted guide.
Best for: Teams with Kubernetes experience that want maximum flexibility, component-level scaling, and the largest ecosystem of integrations and community support. The right choice when you need to monitor 100+ services and want each observability pillar to scale independently.
OpenObserve — Lowest Resource Footprint for Logs
OpenObserve is a Rust-based observability platform that handles logs, metrics, and traces with a focus on storage efficiency. The headline claim: 140x lower storage costs compared to Elasticsearch for equivalent log volumes. In practice, teams report 10-30x compression ratios on real-world log data thanks to columnar storage and built-in compression.
OpenObserve deploys as a single binary — download, run, and start ingesting. It accepts data through OpenTelemetry, Elasticsearch-compatible APIs, and its own REST endpoints. The Elasticsearch API compatibility is a significant advantage for teams migrating from ELK stacks. Existing Filebeat, Fluentd, and Logstash pipelines work with minimal configuration changes.
The built-in UI includes log search, metrics dashboards, trace visualization, and alerting. It is not as polished as SigNoz or Grafana, but it is functional and improving rapidly.
Minimum requirements: 2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM. OpenObserve can run on a Raspberry Pi for homelab use or scale to multi-node clusters for production. Storage can use local disk or S3-compatible object storage — using S3 for log data is where the cost savings become most dramatic.
Limitations: APM capabilities are basic compared to SigNoz or New Relic. There is no service map visualization. The metrics story is competent but less mature than Prometheus. OpenObserve shines brightest as a log management platform with traces and metrics as secondary capabilities.
Best for: Teams drowning in log data that need to cut storage costs drastically. If your primary New Relic use case is log management and you are paying for hundreds of GB of log ingest per month, OpenObserve delivers the most savings.
Uptrace — Tracing-First Observability
Uptrace is a distributed tracing platform built on ClickHouse that also handles metrics and logs. Where SigNoz aims to replace the full New Relic experience, Uptrace focuses on making trace analysis exceptionally good and treats metrics and logs as supporting features.
The tracing UI groups spans by system, service, host, and operation. You get percentile breakdowns (p50, p95, p99), error rate tracking, and automatic detection of slow database queries and HTTP endpoints. Spans link to related logs and metrics, providing the correlation that makes distributed tracing useful for debugging.
Uptrace accepts data exclusively through OpenTelemetry — there is no proprietary SDK or agent. This is a strength for teams already committed to OTel instrumentation. The setup is straightforward: deploy Uptrace with Docker Compose, configure your OTel exporters, and data flows in.
Licensing note: Uptrace uses the Business Source License (BSL) for its core, which converts to AGPL after a defined period. The self-hosted community edition is free for single-organization use. Evaluate the license terms if you plan to offer Uptrace as a service to external customers.
Minimum requirements: 2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM, with ClickHouse handling storage. Scales well for small-to-medium deployments. Larger teams should evaluate SigNoz or the Grafana stack for more flexibility.
Best for: Teams where distributed tracing is the primary observability requirement — debugging latency in microservices, tracking requests across service boundaries, and identifying performance bottlenecks. If you use New Relic mainly for APM and trace analysis, Uptrace is the leanest path to self-hosted tracing.
HyperDX — Unified Debugging with Session Replay
HyperDX differentiates itself by correlating logs, traces, metrics, and browser session replays in a single timeline. Click on an error log, and HyperDX shows you the distributed trace that generated it, the user session that triggered it, and the infrastructure metrics at that exact moment. This end-to-end correlation is the feature New Relic charges Enterprise pricing for.
The platform is built on ClickHouse and accepts data through OpenTelemetry. The session replay capability uses a lightweight browser SDK that captures DOM changes, network requests, and console errors — similar to New Relic's Browser or Datadog's RUM but without per-session pricing.
HyperDX also includes an AI-powered search feature that lets you query logs and traces in natural language. Ask "show me all 500 errors from the checkout service in the last hour" and it translates to the appropriate ClickHouse query. Useful for on-call engineers who need fast answers during incidents.
Setup: Docker Compose deployment with ClickHouse, the HyperDX API, and the frontend. Minimum requirements: 4 vCPU, 8 GB RAM. The Helm chart supports Kubernetes for production deployments.
Limitations: Smaller community than SigNoz or the Grafana stack. The metrics story is less mature — HyperDX is strongest for debugging and incident response rather than long-term metrics dashboarding. Documentation has improved significantly but still trails the more established projects.
Best for: Full-stack teams that need to connect frontend user experience to backend service performance. If your New Relic usage includes Browser monitoring alongside APM and you want to keep that correlation in a self-hosted tool, HyperDX is the only open source option that covers session replay natively.
When to Use Which
Choose SigNoz if:
- You want the closest drop-in replacement for New Relic's full feature set
- Your team prefers a single platform over assembling separate components
- OpenTelemetry is already part of your instrumentation strategy or you plan to adopt it
- You need APM dashboards, traces, logs, and metrics in one UI with minimal setup
Choose Grafana + Prometheus + Loki if:
- You run Kubernetes and want the largest ecosystem of integrations
- You need each observability pillar to scale independently
- Your team has infrastructure experience to manage multiple components
- You want the most community support, documentation, and battle-tested production track record
Choose OpenObserve if:
- Log management is your primary use case and you are paying the most for log ingest on New Relic
- You need Elasticsearch API compatibility for existing pipelines
- You want the smallest resource footprint and lowest storage costs
- S3-compatible object storage is your preferred long-term retention strategy
Choose Uptrace if:
- Distributed tracing and APM are your primary New Relic features
- You want a lightweight, focused tool rather than a full observability platform
- Your team is small (under 20 engineers) and you need fast time-to-value
- You are committed to OpenTelemetry and want a backend that does nothing proprietary
Choose HyperDX if:
- You need session replay alongside APM, logs, and traces in one tool
- Your debugging workflow requires correlating frontend user actions with backend service traces
- You want natural language search over your telemetry data
- Incident response speed matters more than long-term metrics dashboarding
Stay with New Relic if:
- You need fully managed infrastructure with zero operational overhead
- Your data volume stays under 100 GB/month and the free tier covers your needs
- You require enterprise compliance certifications (SOC 2, HIPAA BAA) without self-managing them
- Your team has no capacity to manage observability infrastructure
Migration Strategy: New Relic to Self-Hosted
The migration path is the same regardless of which alternative you choose:
- Instrument with OpenTelemetry. Replace New Relic's proprietary agents with OTel SDKs. This is the most time-consuming step but makes you backend-agnostic. Run both in parallel during migration.
- Deploy your chosen backend. Start with a staging environment. SigNoz and OpenObserve take 15 minutes. The Grafana stack takes 1-2 hours for a production-grade setup.
- Dual-write during transition. Send telemetry to both New Relic and your self-hosted backend for 2-4 weeks. Compare coverage, verify no data gaps, and validate alerting rules.
- Cut over. Remove the New Relic exporter from your OTel Collector configuration. Decommission New Relic agents. Cancel your subscription.
For teams evaluating the broader self-hosted monitoring landscape, our open source monitoring tools overview covers uptime monitors, infrastructure monitoring, and status pages alongside APM platforms.
If error tracking is a separate line item on your New Relic bill, consider pairing your observability backend with a dedicated error tracking tool — our Sentry alternatives guide covers GlitchTip, Highlight, and other self-hosted options.
For a comprehensive list of open source replacements across every SaaS category, see our complete directory of open source alternatives.