</>macrostackBrowse all
Migration guide · Observability & Monitoring

The 3 best free & open-source New Relic alternatives

New Relic is a hosted observability platform covering application performance monitoring (APM), infrastructure, logs, and browser/mobile monitoring. You instrument apps with New Relic agents or OpenTelemetry, and telemetry is sent to New Relic's cloud where it's queried with NRQL (New Relic Query Language) and shown on dashboards.

88
Bottom line

SigNoz is our top pick — An OpenTelemetry-native, single-app APM and observability platform. We compare all 3 options below, with honest trade-offs.

Jump to the full comparison →

The cost

Free tier includes 100 GB/month of data ingest and one full-platform user; beyond that, data is billed per GB ingested and full-platform users are billed per seat, so costs climb with both data volume and team size.

Why people consider an alternative

Ingest-based billing plus per-seat full users make bills hard to predict as data and headcount grow, and all of your telemetry lives in New Relic's cloud. Self-hosted, OpenTelemetry-native stacks give equivalent APM and dashboards at hardware cost, with no per-seat tax.

When New Relic is still the right call

New Relic's mature all-in-one APM, its genuinely useful free tier (100 GB plus one full user), and turnkey setup are strong. If you want production-grade APM without operating your own stack, and your data volume stays modest, staying is a reasonable call.

The verdict — at a glance

AlternativeLicenseSelf-hostPricingSovereignty
SigNoz★MIT (core)YesFree / self-host; optional managed cloud88
Grafana + PrometheusAGPL-3.0 (Grafana) / Apache-2.0 (Prometheus)YesFree / self-host90
NetdataGPL-3.0YesFree / self-host; optional paid cloud85
88
Macrostack's top pick

SigNoz

An OpenTelemetry-native, single-app APM and observability platform.

Every alternative, compared

#1★ TOP PICK

SigNoz

An OpenTelemetry-native, single-app APM and observability platform.

88
OPEN SOURCEMIT (core)SELF-HOSTLOCAL-FIRST 29kupdated today

SigNoz is built natively on OpenTelemetry and brings APM (distributed traces), metrics, and logs into one open-source app. It is purpose-built as a self-hostable stand-in for New Relic/Datadog-style SaaS observability, with no per-seat or per-GB-ingest billing when you run it yourself.

Strengths

  • +OpenTelemetry-native — no proprietary agent or NRQL lock-in
  • +One app for traces, metrics, and logs
  • +No per-seat or per-GB-ingest billing when self-hosted

Trade-offs

  • −Younger ecosystem than New Relic
  • −Self-hosting relies on a ClickHouse-backed datastore to operate
  • −Fewer turnkey integrations than New Relic's catalog
Free / self-host; optional managed cloud
WebsiteSourceDocs
#2

Grafana + Prometheus

The open-source observability standard.

90
OPEN SOURCEAGPL-3.0 (Grafana) / Apache-2.0 (Prometheus)SELF-HOSTLOCAL-FIRST 75kupdated today

Prometheus stores metrics, Grafana visualizes them, and Loki and Tempo add logs and traces — together the de-facto open-source stack that replaces New Relic's dashboards, alerting, and metrics at hardware cost, fully self-hostable.

Strengths

  • +Industry-standard with an enormous ecosystem of dashboards and integrations
  • +Metrics, logs, and traces through one Grafana UI
  • +Portable OpenTelemetry/Prometheus data, no proprietary query lock-in

Trade-offs

  • −You assemble and operate several components yourself
  • −Steeper initial setup than a hosted agent
  • −APM/tracing needs Tempo and instrumentation work to match New Relic
Free / self-host
WebsiteSourceDocs
#3

Netdata

Real-time, per-second infrastructure monitoring with zero-config auto-discovery.

85
OPEN SOURCEGPL-3.0SELF-HOSTLOCAL-FIRST 80kupdated today

Netdata delivers high-resolution, real-time metrics with automatic discovery and minimal configuration. It covers the infrastructure-monitoring slice of New Relic well and is one of the fastest observability tools to stand up on your own machines.

Strengths

  • +Per-second resolution out of the box
  • +Auto-discovers most services with little configuration
  • +Very low setup effort

Trade-offs

  • −Focused on infrastructure metrics — not full APM/tracing like New Relic
  • −Less of a long-term query store than Prometheus
  • −Best paired with other tools for logs and traces
Free / self-host; optional paid cloud
WebsiteSourceDocs

Questions people ask

▸ Can I keep my instrumentation if I move off New Relic?

If you instrument with OpenTelemetry rather than New Relic's proprietary agents, your traces, metrics, and logs are portable — SigNoz, Grafana, and any OpenTelemetry backend can ingest them without re-instrumenting your code. Dashboards and NRQL queries, however, do not port and have to be rebuilt.

▸ Which alternative is closest to New Relic's APM?

SigNoz is the closest single-app match — it is OpenTelemetry-native and built specifically to replace SaaS APM tools like New Relic and Datadog. The Grafana + Prometheus + Tempo stack can match it on breadth but takes more assembly.

Compare them head-to-head

SigNoz vs Grafana + Prometheus→SigNoz vs Netdata→Grafana + Prometheus vs Netdata→

Related comparisons

Alternatives to Datadog3 optionsAlternatives to OpenAI API (ChatGPT)4 optionsAlternatives to Notion4 optionsAlternatives to 1Password4 optionsAlternatives to Google Analytics3 optionsAlternatives to Slack3 options

Entry last verified 2026-07-09. Licenses and pricing change — spotted something out of date? That's a correction we want.

The Macrostack brief

New swaps, worth your inbox.

A short, occasional email when we add a high-intent alternative or ship a new head-to-head. No spam, no selling your address — unsubscribe in one click.