New Relic Synthetic Monitoring vs StatusCake
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 €16.66 per month (Superior, billed annually; €19.99 monthly)
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.
SSL and domain expiry monitoring included on paid plans, which prevents a genuinely common outage cause.
Free tier
100 GB of data ingest and one full-platform user free every month, permanently.
Free plan with unlimited uptime tests at 5-minute intervals.
Open source
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Widely used
New Relic · since 2015
Established
StatusCake · 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.
- SSL and domain expiry alerts prevent an entire class of self-inflicted outage.
- Many test locations even on cheaper plans.
- Simple and reliable.
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.
- No scripted browser journeys.
- Interface is functional rather than pleasant.
- Limited integration with observability platforms.
Best for
Teams wanting an observability platform with monitoring included and a real free tier.
Small teams wanting broad availability coverage cheaply.
All of these integrate with: PagerDuty, Slack.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.