New Relic vs Elastic (Elastic APM)
New Relic vs Elastic (Elastic APM)
New Relic and Elastic are both used for observability, but they take very different approaches. Elastic APM is part of the Elastic Stack (Elasticsearch, Kibana, Logstash, Beats) and is often self-hosted or run on Elastic Cloud. New Relic is a fully managed SaaS observability platform with a unified data model, a purpose-built query language (NRQL), and usage-based pricing. The comparison often comes down to: build and manage your own stack vs use a fully managed platform.
What is the pricing model for New Relic vs Elastic?
New Relic pricing is usage-based and publicly available: 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, $349/user on Pro (annual). No infrastructure to manage.
Elastic pricing depends on deployment model. Self-managed Elastic is open source and free to run, but teams pay for compute, storage, and engineering time to manage clusters, upgrades, scaling, and retention. Elastic Cloud (managed) starts at $16.40/month for the smallest hosted deployment, scaling with compute resources (RAM, storage) and data volume. Elastic Cloud Serverless uses a different model priced per GB ingested and retained, with a 14-day free trial available. Elastic does not use a per-GB ingest pricing model; costs are based on hardware/compute tier selected.
What does each platform include for free?
New Relic free tier includes: 100 GB/month data ingest, one full platform user with all 50+ capabilities, unlimited basic users, and 8-day data retention. No credit card required. No infrastructure to manage.
Elastic open source is free to self-host. Elastic Cloud has a free 14-day trial. Running Elastic at scale requires significant engineering investment in cluster management, index optimization, and shard tuning.
What are the key capability differences?
| Capability | New Relic | Elastic APM |
|---|---|---|
| Deployment model | Fully managed SaaS | Self-managed or Elastic Cloud |
| Pricing model | Usage-based (data + users), publicly listed | Compute/storage based (Elastic Cloud) or self-managed operational cost |
| Free tier | Perpetual: 100 GB/month, 1 full user | Open source (self-managed); 14-day trial on Elastic Cloud |
| APM agents | New Relic agents + OpenTelemetry | Elastic APM agents + OpenTelemetry |
| Log management | Integrated with traces and metrics in NRDB | Elasticsearch as the log store, Kibana for visualization |
| Infrastructure monitoring | Full host, container, Kubernetes monitoring | Metricbeat, Filebeat, Elastic Agent |
| Query language | NRQL (purpose-built for telemetry) | KQL (Kibana Query Language) and Elasticsearch DSL |
| AI/AIOps | Applied Intelligence, anomaly detection, New Relic AI | Elastic AIOps (ML jobs, anomaly detection in Kibana) |
| Managed operations | Fully managed by New Relic | Requires cluster management (self-managed) or Elastic Cloud management |
| OpenTelemetry | Native OTLP ingest | Supported via Elastic Agent and APM Server |
What are the operational differences?
New Relic is a fully managed SaaS platform. Data ingest, storage, indexing, querying, and retention are all handled by New Relic. Engineering teams instrument their applications and infrastructure using agents or OpenTelemetry, and New Relic handles everything else. There are no cluster capacity decisions, no shard management, and no upgrade cycles to plan.
Elastic running in self-managed mode requires engineering time to: provision and scale Elasticsearch clusters; manage index lifecycle policies for data retention and rollover; tune shard counts and mappings as data volume changes; handle Elasticsearch upgrades; and ensure cluster stability during high ingest periods. Elastic Cloud reduces some of this operational burden but still requires sizing decisions and monitoring of the Elastic Cloud deployment itself.
What types of teams choose New Relic vs Elastic?
Teams often choose New Relic when: they want a fully managed, zero-infrastructure observability platform; they want purpose-built APM with correlated logs, traces, and infrastructure in one view; they prefer predictable usage-based pricing over managing compute resources; or they want fast time-to-value without cluster management overhead.
Teams often choose Elastic when: they already run Elasticsearch at scale for search or security use cases and want to reuse the infrastructure for APM; they have deep in-house Elastic expertise and want full control over data storage and query optimization; they need Elastic's SIEM and security analytics capabilities alongside observability; or they are in environments where data sovereignty requirements make a self-hosted deployment preferable to SaaS.
New Relic vs Elastic pricing FAQs
Is New Relic cheaper than Elastic?
The answer depends on how Elastic is deployed. Self-managed Elastic has no license cost but carries significant engineering and infrastructure overhead. Elastic Cloud pricing is based on compute and storage resources, which scales in a different way than New Relic's per-GB ingest model. For teams that factor in the total cost of ownership (including engineering time to manage clusters, tune performance, and handle upgrades), New Relic's managed SaaS pricing is often more predictable and cost-effective, especially as data volume grows.
Can New Relic replace Elastic APM?
For teams using Elastic primarily for APM and log management in the context of application observability, New Relic covers the same use cases with less operational overhead. Teams using Elastic for security operations, SIEM, or full-text search will find that New Relic does not replace those specific Elastic capabilities. You can explore New Relic's platform and start for free at newrelic.com.
Does New Relic support OpenTelemetry like Elastic does?
Yes. New Relic accepts OpenTelemetry data via OTLP natively. Traces, metrics, and logs sent from OpenTelemetry SDKs or collectors appear directly in New Relic's platform alongside data from New Relic's own agents. Both New Relic and Elastic support OTel, but New Relic is a member of the OpenTelemetry governance board and contributes actively to OTel specification development.