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testcritic

New Relic Synthetic Monitoring vs Dynatrace

Feature checklists rarely decide anything. What decides it is the pricing metric, who has to write the tests, and which limitation you can live with.

Entry price

Free tier available

Free tier

From $58 per month per 8 GiB host (full-stack), or $0.01 per memory-GiB-hour

Paid

What drives the bill

The metric that actually scales your invoice.

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

Consumption-based pricing across hosts, synthetic requests, RUM sessions and log volume, billed on memory rather than CPU — a large host costs proportionally more. Enterprise contracts are large.

Free tier

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

15-day trial.

Open source

Self-hostable

No-code authoring

Languages

JavaScript
JavaC#JavaScriptPythonGoPHP

Platforms

WebAPI
WebAPIiOSAndroidDesktopSAPMainframe

Fits teams

StartupScale-up / mid-marketEnterprise
Enterprise

Adoption

Widely used

New Relic · since 2015

Widely used

Dynatrace · since 2005

Strengths

  • 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.
  • Automatic discovery and dependency mapping removes most manual instrumentation work.
  • Davis root-cause analysis genuinely reduces alert noise in complex estates.
  • Covers mainframe and SAP alongside cloud-native workloads.

Limitations

  • 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.
  • Expensive, with consumption pricing that is hard to forecast.
  • Heavy platform aimed at organisations with a dedicated operations function.
  • Overkill for a straightforward web application.

Best for

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

Large enterprises with complex hybrid estates and a dedicated SRE or operations team.

All of these integrate with: Slack.

Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.