New Relic Synthetic Monitoring vs Datadog Synthetic Monitoring

Free tier available

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

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

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.

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

14-day trial.

Widely used

New Relic · since 2015

Category standard

Datadog · since 2019

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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

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