Open Source Alternatives
Open Source Observability Alternatives to New Relic
Application performance monitoring and observability.
New Relic is a trademark of its respective owner.
Updated Jun 2026
What you gain
- ✓No per-GB ingestion pricing on logs and traces
- ✓No per-seat Full Platform User licensing ($549/user/mo)
- ✓Full control over telemetry data retention and querying
- ✓Self-hosted deployment with OpenTelemetry-native backends
What you give up
- △No NRQL for querying all telemetry types in one language
- △No built-in Errors Inbox with automatic error grouping across services
- △No managed Distributed Tracing with automatic service maps
- △No Vulnerability Management integrated with APM data
Switching Cost
New Relic's data is exportable via NRQL and their APIs, so you won't lose historical data if you plan ahead. The pain is in the instrumentation. Every custom dashboard, every alert policy, every synthetic monitor needs rebuilding. Teams with heavy custom instrumentation (custom attributes, distributed tracing configs) should budget 2-3 weeks. Teams using mostly out-of-the-box APM can switch to Grafana or SigNoz in a few days.
| Grafana | SigNoz | openobserve | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Overlap | 75% | 70% | 55% |
| Migration | moderate | moderate | significant |
| License | GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 | MIT + Enterprise | GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 |
| Best for | Small teams | Teams with DevOps | Small teams |
We find the alternatives so you don't have to
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Drop-in Replacements
Ranked by feature coverage
Grafana
8175% coverageOpen observability and data visualization platform
Grafana connects to everything and makes the data useful. It doesn't store data itself.
SigNoz
8170% coverageOpenTelemetry-native observability with logs, traces, and metrics
SigNoz gives you performance traces, error rates, and system metrics in one dashboard. It's built on OpenTelemetry (the open standard for collecting observability data), which means you're not locked into a proprietary SDK.
openobserve
7355% coverageOpenObserve is an open-source observability platform for logs, metrics, traces, and frontend monitoring. A cost-effective alternative to Datadog, Splunk, and Elasticsearch with 140x lower storage costs and single binary deployment.
OpenObserve handles logs, metrics, traces, and frontend monitoring in one tool. It pitches itself as a Datadog and Splunk alternative, but the real story is the storage architecture.
Building Blocks
New Relic is a platform. It bundles multiple capabilities into one subscription. These tools each cover one piece. Teams often assemble 2–3 of them instead of paying for the full suite.
SkyWalking
85covers: apm + tracing50%APM and monitoring system
Uptrace
63covers: traces + metrics50%Open source APM with OpenTelemetry traces, metrics, and logs
Netdata
79covers: infra metrics45%Real-time performance and health monitoring
Prometheus
86covers: metrics + alerting40%Monitoring system and time series database
OpenTelemetry Collector
81covers: instrumentation40%Vendor-agnostic telemetry collection
Show 6 more building blocks
Loki
73covers: logs40%Horizontally-scalable, multi-tenant log aggregation
Jaeger
85covers: tracing35%CNCF distributed tracing platform
Zipkin
85covers: tracing35%Distributed tracing system
graylog2-server
67covers: logs35%Free and open log management
prometheus-operator
81covers: metrics + alerting30%Prometheus Operator creates/configures/manages Prometheus clusters atop Kubernetes
opentelemetry-ebpf-profiler
71covers: continuous profiling30%The production-scale datacenter profiler (C/C++, Go, Rust, Python, Java, NodeJS, .NET, PHP, Ruby, Perl, ...)