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testcritic

UptimeRobot 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 €9 per month (Solo, billed annually; €10 monthly)

Free tier

Free tier available

Free tier

What drives the bill

The metric that actually scales your invoice.

One of the best free tiers in infrastructure tooling, and paid plans are still inexpensive: Solo €9, Team €35 and Scale €65 a month on annual billing. Solo buys the 60-second interval.

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

Free tier

50 monitors at 5-minute intervals, free forever, with SSL and domain-expiry checks and one status page.

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

Open source

Self-hostable

No-code authoring

Languages

Codeless
JavaScript

Platforms

WebAPI
WebAPI

Fits teams

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

Adoption

Widely used

UptimeRobot · since 2010

Widely used

New Relic · since 2015

Strengths

  • Free tier covers what most small projects actually need.
  • Five-minute setup with no configuration to learn.
  • Status pages included even on lower tiers.
  • 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 browser-based transaction monitoring — availability only.
  • Basic alerting logic; expect some noise from transient failures.
  • Limited reporting and no observability integration.
  • 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

Side projects, small businesses and anyone who currently has no monitoring at all.

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.