Better Stack vs New Relic Synthetic Monitoring

From $25 per month per additional 50 monitors ($21 on yearly billing)

Free tier available

There are no named tiers for uptime monitoring — you start from the free 10 monitors and add blocks of 50. Still substantially cheaper than assembling Pingdom, PagerDuty and Statuspage separately.

The free tier is genuinely usable. Costs come from full-platform user seats rather than check volume.

10 monitors and heartbeats plus 1 status page, with Slack and email alerts.

100 GB of data ingest and one full-platform user free every month, permanently.

Established

Better Stack · since 2021

Widely used

New Relic · since 2015

• Replaces three separate subscriptions with one at a lower total cost.
• Excellent status pages and incident communication out of the box.
• Fast check intervals even on modest plans.

• The most generous permanent free tier of any major observability platform.
• Synthetics, APM, logs and RUM under one bill and one query language.
• Scripted browser monitors use standard Selenium-style JavaScript.

• Browser-based transaction monitoring is limited compared to Checkly or Datadog.
• Log management is capable but not a full observability platform.
• Younger vendor than the incumbents.

• Per-user pricing for full-platform access surprises teams that want wide visibility.
• The interface is dense and takes time to navigate confidently.
• Synthetics is less differentiated than Datadog's correlation story.

Small and mid-sized teams consolidating uptime, on-call and status pages.

Teams wanting an observability platform with monitoring included and a real free tier.