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testcritic

Sentry vs New Relic Synthetic Monitoring

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

From $26 per month (Team plan, indicative)

Free tier

Free tier available

Free tier

What drives the bill

The metric that actually scales your invoice.

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

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

Free tier

Free developer plan with a monthly error and replay allowance.

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

Open source

BSL / FSL

Self-hostable

No-code authoring

Languages

JavaScriptTypeScriptPythonJavaC#GoRubyPHPSwiftKotlinDart
JavaScript

Platforms

WebAPIiOSAndroidDesktop
WebAPI

Fits teams

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

Adoption

Category standard

Functional Software (Sentry) · since 2012

Widely used

New Relic · since 2015

Strengths

  • 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.
  • 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.

Limitations

  • 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.
  • 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.

Best for

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

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

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

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