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testcritic

New Relic Synthetic Monitoring vs Sentry

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 $26 per month (Team plan, indicative)

Free tier

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.

Event-volume pricing. A noisy application can consume the quota quickly, so filtering matters.

Free tier

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

Free developer plan with a monthly error and replay allowance.

Open source

BSL / FSL

Self-hostable

No-code authoring

Languages

JavaScript
JavaScriptTypeScriptPythonJavaC#GoRubyPHPSwiftKotlinDart

Platforms

WebAPI
WebAPIiOSAndroidDesktop

Fits teams

StartupScale-up / mid-marketEnterprise
Solo / side projectStartupScale-up / mid-marketEnterprise

Adoption

Widely used

New Relic · since 2015

Category standard

Functional Software (Sentry) · since 2012

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.
  • Release and commit attribution tells you which deploy introduced the error, and often who to ask.
  • Excellent SDK coverage across essentially every language and framework.
  • Self-hosting is genuinely supported for teams that need it.

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.
  • Event-based pricing punishes noisy applications until you invest in filtering.
  • The product has broadened a lot; some newer modules are shallower than the error core.
  • Self-hosting is resource-hungry.

Best for

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

Essentially every engineering team — error tracking is the highest-value monitoring you can add first.

All of these integrate with: PagerDuty, Slack, GitHub.

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