New Relic → SigNoz
What it saves, what actually moves, what you rebuild — and the thing that catches people.
What it costs, and what it saves
New Relic bills per user plus $0.35 per GB ingested beyond 100GB free. A team of eight with moderate ingest lands near $400/month. SigNoz self-hosted is infrastructure only — typically $50–100/month on a box sized for ClickHouse.
Moves cleanly
OpenTelemetry instrumentation moves directly. New Relic accepts OTel natively, so if you are already sending OTLP the migration is a change of endpoint.
You rebuild
Dashboards, alert conditions, and any NRQL query you depend on. NRQL has no equivalent — SigNoz uses its own query builder and ClickHouse SQL underneath.
What New Relic costs you today
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.
What actually holds you in
New Relic's proprietary agents and its NRQL query language mean dashboards, alerts, and saved queries don't port elsewhere; the practical lock-in is economic (ingest + seats) and query-language, more than raw data format if you instrument with OpenTelemetry.
What you are moving to
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.
Free / self-host; optional managed cloud
SigNoz 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
What you give up
- Younger ecosystem than New Relic
- Self-hosting relies on a ClickHouse-backed datastore to operate
- Fewer turnkey integrations than New Relic's catalog
The migration, step by step
- 1Confirm whether you are on the New Relic agent or OTel — this decides whether it is a week or a month
- 2Deploy SigNoz, point OTLP at it, run both
- 3Port your alert conditions one at a time, starting with the ones that have paged someone this quarter
- 4Delete the alerts nobody has acted on — most teams find half
- 5Cut over and drop the New Relic user seats, which is where the saving actually is
The gotcha
New Relic's per-user pricing means the saving is in seats, not ingest. If you cancel ingest but keep users for dashboards you have saved almost nothing. Cancel seats or do not bother.
When to stay on New Relic
You use New Relic's error inbox and it is genuinely part of your incident process — SigNoz's is thinner.
More Layer 3 migrations
Figures verified 2026-07-09 against vendor pricing pages. Prices change and migrations differ by estate — treat the cost delta as a starting model, not a quote. Rankings and recommendations here are merit-only; affiliate income never changes a verdict. See our methodology.