Datadog Synthetic Monitoring vs New Relic Synthetic Monitoring

From $5 per 10k API test runs (browser tests are $12 per 1k)

Free tier available

Note the different units: Datadog bills API tests per ten thousand runs and browser tests per thousand, so browser tests are roughly 24x the unit cost. A test run is one execution from one location, so multi-location checks multiply. Costs land inside a wider Datadog contract that is rarely small.

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

14-day trial.

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

Category standard

Datadog · since 2019

Widely used

New Relic · since 2015

• Correlation with APM traces and logs makes root-cause analysis dramatically faster.
• Private locations let you monitor internal services behind the firewall.
• Recorded browser tests are authorable by people who do not write code.

• 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.

• Only worth it if you are already a Datadog customer; standalone it is expensive.
• Datadog billing complexity is a well-known source of budget surprises.
• The recorder produces tests that are harder to version and review than code.

• 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.

Existing Datadog customers who want monitoring in the same pane as their observability data.

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