New Relic Synthetic Monitoring vs Grafana Synthetic Monitoring
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 tierFree tier available
Free tierWhat 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.
Cheap if you already run Grafana Cloud; results are plain Prometheus metrics you already know how to use.
Free tier
100 GB of data ingest and one full-platform user free every month, permanently.
Included in the Grafana Cloud free tier with a monthly check allowance.
Open source
Apache-2.0 (agent)
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Widely used
New Relic · since 2015
Established
Grafana Labs · since 2021
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.
- Results are Prometheus metrics, so alerting and dashboards use tools you already have.
- Same k6 scripts serve load testing and synthetic monitoring.
- Good free tier within Grafana Cloud.
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.
- Assumes you are in the Grafana ecosystem; standalone it makes little sense.
- Browser checks are less mature than Datadog's or Checkly's.
- Fewer probe locations than the dedicated vendors.
Best for
Teams wanting an observability platform with monitoring included and a real free tier.
Teams already running Grafana Cloud and k6.
All of these integrate with: PagerDuty, Slack, Terraform.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.