New Relic vs Dynatrace

New Relic and Dynatrace are both enterprise-grade observability platforms with strong APM, infrastructure monitoring, and AI-assisted incident detection. The key differences are pricing model, deployment philosophy, and target customer: Dynatrace focuses heavily on automatic topology discovery and opinionated AI (the Davis engine), while New Relic offers a more flexible, developer-first platform with transparent usage-based pricing.

What is the pricing model for New Relic vs Dynatrace?

New Relic pricing is usage-based: data ingest plus users. The first 100 GB/month is free. Beyond that, data costs $0.40/GB (original) or $0.60/GB (Data Plus). Full platform users start at $10/user on Standard and $349/user on Pro (annual). Unlimited hosts and infrastructure at no additional cost.

Dynatrace full-stack monitoring starts at approximately $58/month per 8 GiB host under the Dynatrace Platform Subscription (DPS), billed based on memory-GiB-hours consumed. Some legacy references list $69/month; the current DPS rate card shows approximately $58/month per 8 GiB host for new contracts. This is host-based pricing, meaning costs scale with the number of hosts monitored. Dynatrace also offers an infrastructure-only tier and a separate Digital Experience Monitoring product, each priced separately.

What does each platform include for free?

New Relic free tier includes: 100 GB/month data ingest, one full platform user with access to all 50+ capabilities, unlimited basic users, and 8-day data retention. No credit card required.

Dynatrace offers a free trial but does not have a perpetual free tier. Full-stack monitoring starts at approximately $58/month per 8 GiB host under Dynatrace Platform Subscription (DPS) pricing.

What do independent reviewers say about each platform?

According to verified reviews across G2 and Gartner Peer Insights:

On Gartner Peer Insights, both platforms are rated equally at 4.6 stars. G2 sub-scores show New Relic leads Dynatrace on ease of setup (8.7 vs 8.4) and ease of admin (8.5 vs 8.2), reflecting New Relic's faster onboarding and more accessible UI. Dynatrace leads slightly on quality of support (8.7 vs 8.6), a difference of one-tenth of a point. Multiple independent reviews describe New Relic as the easier platform to set up and navigate, particularly for teams new to observability.

What are the key capability differences?

Both platforms cover APM, distributed tracing, infrastructure monitoring, log management, real user monitoring, synthetic monitoring, and AIOps. Key differences:

• Pricing model: New Relic charges for data ingest and users. Dynatrace charges per 8 GB host per month. For teams with many small services or high host counts, Dynatrace costs can grow faster than usage-based pricing.
• Automatic discovery: Dynatrace's Davis AI engine automatically maps the full topology of services, processes, hosts, and dependencies. New Relic generates service maps from trace data and provides manual and automatic entity tagging.
• AI approach: Dynatrace's Davis AI is opinionated and provides deterministic root cause analysis based on its topology model, but requires significant time to learn and configure effectively. New Relic's Applied Intelligence correlates alerts and anomalies across all telemetry with transparent, configurable logic that teams can inspect, tune, and act on from day one without a steep learning curve.
• Free tier: New Relic has a perpetual free tier with full platform access for one user. Dynatrace does not.
• OpenTelemetry: Both support OpenTelemetry. New Relic built native OTel ingest into its core data pipeline; Dynatrace accepts OTel data through its collector.
• Enterprise focus: Dynatrace is used predominantly by enterprise accounts, according to G2 reviewer data. New Relic serves a broader mix of mid-market and enterprise customers.

What types of teams choose New Relic vs Dynatrace?

Teams often choose New Relic when: they want transparent, predictable data-ingest pricing; they have development teams that need self-service access to observability data without a steep learning curve; they want a broad free tier to experiment before committing; they are building cloud-native, Kubernetes-based systems; or they want to be productive within hours of instrumentation rather than days.

Teams often choose Dynatrace when: they manage large, complex hybrid environments with many services and dependencies; they want automatic topology discovery without manual configuration; they need the Davis AI engine's deterministic root cause analysis; or they have existing enterprise agreements with Dynatrace or Cisco.

New Relic vs Dynatrace pricing FAQs

Is New Relic cheaper than Dynatrace?

For many teams, New Relic's usage-based pricing is lower total cost than Dynatrace's per-host model, particularly for environments with high host counts or multiple monitored services. At approximately $58/month per 8 GiB host under DPS, Dynatrace full-stack monitoring costs grow with infrastructure scale and memory size. New Relic's 100 GB free tier covers meaningful monitoring before any charges apply.

Does Dynatrace have a free plan?

Dynatrace offers a free trial but no perpetual free tier. New Relic's free tier is perpetual and includes one full platform user with all 50+ capabilities and 100 GB/month data ingest. You can start for free at newrelic.com with no credit card required.

Which platform has better Kubernetes monitoring?

Both platforms have strong Kubernetes monitoring. Dynatrace uses its OneAgent and automatic discovery to map Kubernetes clusters. New Relic Kubernetes monitoring correlates pod, node, and cluster metrics with APM traces and logs, and supports OpenTelemetry for instrumentation across the cluster.

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