New Relic Synthetic Monitoring vs Grafana Synthetic Monitoring

Free tier available

Free tier available

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.

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.

Widely used

New Relic · since 2015

Established

Grafana Labs · 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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

Teams already running Grafana Cloud and k6.