New Relic Synthetic Monitoring vs Better Stack

Free tier available

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

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

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.

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

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

Widely used

New Relic · since 2015

Established

Better Stack · since 2021

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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

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