StatusCake 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 €16.66 per month (Superior, billed annually; €19.99 monthly)
Free tierFree tier available
Free tierWhat drives the bill
The metric that actually scales your invoice.
SSL and domain expiry monitoring included on paid plans, which prevents a genuinely common outage cause.
The free tier is genuinely usable. Costs come from full-platform user seats rather than check volume.
Free tier
Free plan with unlimited uptime tests at 5-minute intervals.
100 GB of data ingest and one full-platform user free every month, permanently.
Open source
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Established
StatusCake · since 2012
Widely used
New Relic · since 2015
Strengths
- SSL and domain expiry alerts prevent an entire class of self-inflicted outage.
- Many test locations even on cheaper plans.
- Simple and reliable.
- 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
- No scripted browser journeys.
- Interface is functional rather than pleasant.
- Limited integration with observability platforms.
- 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
Small teams wanting broad availability coverage cheaply.
Teams wanting an observability platform with monitoring included and a real free tier.
All of these integrate with: Slack, PagerDuty.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.