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 tierFrom $26 per month (Team plan, indicative)
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.
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
Platforms
Fits teams
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.