New Relic Synthetic Monitoring vs Pingdom

Free tier available

From $18 per month (10 uptime checks, 1 advanced check, 50 SMS; $16.50 annual)

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

Priced by a calculator rather than named tiers: 50 uptime checks run about $78/month and 100 about $149, so the per-check rate falls slowly with volume. Transaction checks and Real User Monitoring are priced separately from basic uptime checks and add up.

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

30-day trial.

Widely used

New Relic · since 2015

Widely used

SolarWinds · since 2007

• 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.

• Very large global probe network with a long operating history.
• Simple to set up for basic availability monitoring.
• Combines synthetic checks with real-user monitoring.

• 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.

• Feature development has been slow under SolarWinds ownership.
• Transaction-check authoring is dated compared to code-first alternatives.
• Pricing is no longer competitive against newer entrants.

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

Organisations wanting an established name for straightforward uptime monitoring.