Pingdom vs New Relic Synthetic Monitoring

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

Free tier available

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.

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

30-day trial.

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

Widely used

SolarWinds · since 2007

Widely used

New Relic · since 2015

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Organisations wanting an established name for straightforward uptime monitoring.

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