Most observability comparisons are between platforms trying to solve the same problem. New Relic and Uptrace aren't. They represent two very different ideas of what an observability platform should be.
New Relic aims to be a complete, managed observability platform. It combines APM, infrastructure monitoring, logs, digital experience monitoring, AI-powered investigations, and an expanding agentic platform into a single product. The idea is simple: your engineering team should be able to investigate almost any production issue without leaving the platform.
Uptrace has a much narrower goal. Built on OpenTelemetry and ClickHouse, it focuses on providing fast, affordable application observability without the complexity that often comes with enterprise platforms. If your applications are already instrumented with OpenTelemetry, Uptrace gives you a lightweight backend for collecting and exploring telemetry, without asking you to pay for features you may never use.
That difference becomes especially noticeable once your team starts growing. New Relic's free tier is one of the most generous in the industry, making it easy for individuals and small teams to get started. As more engineers need full access to traces, infrastructure, and debugging tools, however, user licensing becomes an increasingly important part of the total cost. Uptrace doesn't have that tradeoff. There are no user or seat licenses to think about, and pricing is based primarily on the amount of telemetry you store.
Of course, that simplicity comes with tradeoffs. Uptrace intentionally stays focused on observability, leaving areas like incident management, on-call scheduling, AI-assisted investigations, digital experience monitoring, session replay, and enterprise compliance to other tools. Those aren't missing features waiting on the roadmap, they're outside the project's scope.
This comparison isn't about deciding which platform has the longer feature list. It's about deciding whether your team needs a full observability platform or a focused, OpenTelemetry-native backend. We'll compare them across architecture, APM, infrastructure monitoring, logs, AI capabilities, pricing, and operational workflows to help you understand where each approach makes the most sense.
| Feature | New Relic | Uptrace |
|---|---|---|
| Primary purpose | Full-stack observability platform | OTLP-native APM backend |
| Deployment model | SaaS only | Cloud (EU), self-hosted (free), on-premises |
| Free tier | Yes (100GB/month + 1 full platform user, forever) | Yes (50GB/month cloud; self-hosted free, unlimited) |
| Pricing model | Per-user + data ingest (GB) | Data volume only (no seats, no hosts) |
| Ingest rate | $0.40/GB (Original) or $0.60/GB (Data Plus) | $0.10/GB (volume discounts to $0.016/GB) |
| Per-user fee | Yes (Full Platform: $349/month Pro annual) | No |
| Hard budget cap | No | Yes |
| Custom metric surcharges | No | No |
| APM / distributed tracing | Yes (primary strength) | Yes (primary strength) |
| Log management | Yes (all logs searchable, $0.40/GB) | Yes (all logs searchable, $0.10/GB) |
| Infrastructure monitoring | Yes | Yes |
| Kubernetes monitoring | Yes | Yes |
| Real user monitoring | Yes (browser + mobile, Gartner Leader) | No |
| Session replay | Yes | No |
| Synthetic monitoring | Yes | No |
| Error tracking | Yes | Basic (within traces only) |
| AI investigation | Yes (SRE Agent, Preview Feb 2026) | No |
| MCP server | Yes (Preview, Agentic Platform) | No |
| Incident management | Alerting + Applied Intelligence | Alerting only (email, Slack, webhook) |
| On-call scheduling | Via integrations | Not available |
| Status pages | No | No |
| Self-hosted option | No | Yes (free, AGPL Community Edition) |
| Open source | No | Yes (Community Edition) |
| OTLP-native | Yes (no surcharge) | Exclusive (OTLP-only ingestion) |
| Grafana compatibility | Limited | Yes (Tempo + Prometheus datasource) |
| SOC 2 Type II | Yes | In progress |
| HIPAA | Yes (Data Plus) | No |
| FedRAMP | Yes (Moderate, expanding to High) | No |
New Relic's backend is NRDB, a single store holding logs, metrics, traces, and events queryable through NRQL. Every product New Relic ships reads from the same database, and that unified backend is what makes the investigation experience feel coherent: pivot from a slow trace to its surrounding infrastructure metrics to the raw logs from the same request, all without a product switch.
The pricing reflects that unity. Two dimensions: how much data you send, and which users need full access. Basic users are free and can view dashboards. Full platform users at $349/month on Pro get everything — APM, infrastructure monitoring, distributed tracing, RUM, and anything else New Relic ships. The seat model creates a predictable cost pressure: the more engineers who need to investigate incidents, the more seats, the higher the bill, regardless of data volume.
Uptrace takes a different shape. It accepts data exclusively via OTLP, stores everything in ClickHouse, and surfaces it through a unified trace, metric, and log interface with no proprietary agent to maintain and no vendor-specific SDK beyond the standard OTel libraries. The v2.0 release brought JSON-based span storage enabling 5 to 10x query performance improvements, real-time transformation rules that let you filter or enrich incoming telemetry before it hits storage, and multi-project support.
The hard budget cap deserves specific mention because New Relic doesn't have an equivalent: you set a monthly ceiling and Uptrace guarantees it will never charge above that amount, dropping data rather than overcharging. A misconfigured integration that suddenly generates 50x normal telemetry volume won't produce a surprise invoice on the 28th. New Relic provides alerting tools when ingest approaches a threshold, but those alerts don't stop the meter.
The Community Edition on GitHub is free under the AGPL license, fully featured, with no daily cap and no feature restrictions. Run ClickHouse, PostgreSQL, and the Uptrace server, and you have a production-grade observability backend for the cost of your own infrastructure.
| Architectural factor | New Relic | Uptrace |
|---|---|---|
| Data storage | NRDB (unified, proprietary) | ClickHouse + PostgreSQL |
| Query language | NRQL (proprietary, unified) | ClickHouse SQL + PromQL |
| Data collection | APM agents, eBPF (eAPM), or OTel | OTLP only (no proprietary agent) |
| Self-hosted option | No | Yes (free Community Edition) |
| Hard budget cap | No | Yes |
| Open source | No | Yes (AGPL) |
| Cost pressure grows with | Engineer headcount needing full access | Data volume |
Both platforms stop at telemetry and alerting. Neither has built-in on-call scheduling with phone and SMS delivery or customer-facing status pages. Better Stack brings all of that together alongside logs, metrics, and traces, so you can go from alert to post-mortem without switching tools.
From heartbeat monitoring to incident timelines to status pages, one platform for the whole reliability lifecycle. Start free.
The two platforms are most directly comparable here, and it's the most honest section of this article: both are serious APM products, and the gap is smaller than the pricing gap might suggest.
New Relic offers language-specific APM agents alongside its eBPF-based eAPM for zero-code Kubernetes instrumentation. The combination gives you thread-level CPU profiling, showing exactly which function is consuming cycles in production, which Uptrace's OTLP-only path simply can't match at that resolution. Infinite Tracing retains the most significant traces out of 100% of collected data, useful when sampling blind spots are a real concern. Frontend-to-backend correlation works natively because RUM and APM share the same NRDB backend.
Uptrace accepts data exclusively via OTLP, which is actually a stronger OTel commitment than most platforms make: no proprietary ingestion path, no alternate SDK, no agent that diverges from the standard. If you're already instrumented, switching to Uptrace means updating one config line in your OTel Collector rather than touching application code. The v2.0 JSON-based span storage enables queries against any span attribute without pre-indexing, which matters for high-cardinality ad-hoc investigation. Flame graphs, service maps with RED metrics, and latency percentiles at p50/p90/p99 are all present.
The meaningful limitation: every service needs OTel SDK instrumentation for coverage. In a small, greenfield environment where you control instrumentation from day one, no problem. In an existing polyglot environment with dozens of services at different OTel adoption stages, coverage gaps appear until someone instruments each one. New Relic's eBPF agent instruments automatically regardless of whether the application has been touched. Uptrace also has no frontend APM: no RUM, no session replay, no way to correlate a slow page load with the backend trace within Uptrace itself.
| APM / tracing | New Relic | Uptrace |
|---|---|---|
| Instrumentation | APM agents, eBPF (eAPM), or OTel | OTel SDKs only (OTLP-only ingestion) |
| OTel support | Yes (native, no surcharge) | Exclusive (only ingestion path, no surcharge) |
| Code-level profiling | Yes (thread profiling via APM agents) | No |
| Frontend-to-backend correlation | Yes (RUM + APM share NRDB) | Not available (no RUM) |
| Service maps | Yes | Yes |
| High-cardinality span queries | Yes | Yes (v2.0 JSON storage) |
| Self-hosted option | No | Yes (free) |
| APM pricing | Included in ingest + user license | $0.10/GB traces |
New Relic folds APM into a broader license that still bills by user seat and data volume. Better Stack's tracing is priced purely by data volume with no span indexing fees and no cardinality penalties, and the AI SRE activates automatically during incidents to investigate root cause before you have to ask.
Full-fidelity distributed tracing from every service, priced by volume with no surprises. Explore Better Stack tracing.
Both platforms make all ingested logs searchable without a separate indexing tier, which already puts them ahead of Datadog's indexed-vs-archived model. The difference is in how much that searchability costs, and it's not close.
New Relic charges $0.40/GB beyond the free 100GB/month. Uptrace charges $0.10/GB. At 1TB of logs per month, that's $400 on New Relic versus $100 on Uptrace for the same searchable log corpus. At 5TB it's $2,000 against $500. New Relic's logs run through NRQL alongside every other signal, which is the cross-signal correlation payoff, and AI log alert summarization generates a hypothesis when an alert fires. Uptrace stores logs in ClickHouse via OTLP, correlates them with traces automatically through OTel context propagation, and queries them with ClickHouse SQL. The v2.0 real-time transformation layer lets you drop noisy debug-level logs at the ingestion layer before they reach storage, which is the practical cost control lever Uptrace gives you that New Relic's flat per-GB model doesn't.
The seven-year retention New Relic offers without rehydration is a genuine differentiator for compliance-driven teams. Uptrace's retention is configurable and can be extended, but there's no equivalent multi-year default out of the box.
| Log management | New Relic | Uptrace |
|---|---|---|
| Billing | $0.40/GB (100GB/month free) | $0.10/GB (50GB/month free; free self-hosted) |
| All logs searchable | Yes | Yes |
| Query language | NRQL | ClickHouse SQL |
| AI alert summarization | Yes | No |
| Trace correlation | Seamless (NRDB) | Automatic (OTel context propagation) |
| Real-time ingestion filtering | Limited | Yes (v2.0 transformation layer) |
| Long-term retention | Up to 7 years, no rehydration | Configurable |
| Self-hosted | No | Yes (free) |
Both New Relic and Uptrace make all ingested logs searchable without a separate indexing decision, but you're still paying per gigabyte at very different rates. Better Stack stores logs in a unified warehouse with SQL querying and no per-event charges. You pay for what you send, and all of it is searchable.
Unified log management with SQL search, live tail, and no indexing surprises. See how it works.
Neither platform charges cardinality penalties on standard metrics, which removes one common source of bill shock from this comparison. What's left is pricing structure and access model.
New Relic's infrastructure agent covers Linux, Windows, and macOS, with no-agent cloud integrations for AWS, Azure, and GCP. Raw metrics stick around for 30 days with 13 months of aggregated rollups. No cardinality penalties since billing runs on ingest volume. The catch, consistent throughout New Relic's model: viewing infrastructure data during an incident requires a full platform seat at $349/month. If the engineer on call doesn't already have that access provisioned, they're locked out when it matters most.
Uptrace bills metrics per million ingested datapoints at $0.025/million. At the default one-minute collection interval, 1,000 timeseries over 28 days produces roughly 40 million datapoints, costing about $1. You can stretch collection intervals for non-critical metrics to reduce cost without touching application code. The metric extraction feature lets you derive metrics from log fields automatically: any structured log field becomes queryable as a metric without pre-configuring extraction rules.
Uptrace ships 50+ pre-built dashboards that activate when data starts flowing, covering Kubernetes, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, Nginx, and other common stacks. The Grafana datasource compatibility is useful for teams with existing dashboard investments: point those dashboards at Uptrace as a Prometheus or Tempo datasource without rebuilding anything. New Relic doesn't offer this bridge for teams coming from Grafana-based setups.
The access model difference matters more than it sounds. Uptrace has no user tiers, so every engineer who needs to look at infrastructure metrics can, without a seat fee. The cost of looking at data is purely the data itself.
| Infrastructure monitoring | New Relic | Uptrace |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | Data ingest + full platform user seats | Per million datapoints ($0.025/million) |
| OS coverage | Linux, Windows, macOS | Kubernetes-first (via OTel exporters) |
| Access to view metrics | Full platform user required ($349/month) | All users (no seat model) |
| Cardinality penalties | No | No |
| Grafana compatibility | Limited | Yes (Prometheus datasource) |
| Pre-built dashboards | Yes | Yes (50+, auto-created) |
| Self-hosted metrics | No | Yes (free) |
Both platforms charge for infrastructure telemetry in different ways, and both gate access by either seat type or data volume. Better Stack takes a different approach: no per-host fees, no cardinality penalties, and infra metrics that live alongside uptime monitors, on-call schedules, and incident timelines.
Infrastructure monitoring connected to alerting, on-call, and incident management, all in one place. Get started free.
New Relic has a full DEM suite: browser RUM, mobile RUM across iOS, Android, React Native, and Flutter, session replay, synthetic monitoring from global probe locations, and two consecutive years as a Gartner Magic Quadrant Leader in digital experience monitoring. Uptrace has none of this.
If you need to understand what users experience in the browser or on mobile, correlate frontend timing with backend traces, or run synthetic checks from global locations, New Relic can do all of that and Uptrace cannot. For teams where DEM is a hard requirement, this section settles the comparison.
For teams who don't need DEM, and many backend-focused engineering teams genuinely don't, the $349/month seat cost to access New Relic's digital experience data during an incident starts to look like a tax on capabilities you're not using. That's the Uptrace value proposition in a sentence.
The gap here is structural, not a matter of one platform being ahead in a shared race. New Relic has a genuine AI roadmap. Uptrace doesn't, and isn't trying to.
The SRE Agent launched February 2026, running full-stack diagnostics using Intelligent Root Cause Analysis during incidents. The Agentic Platform around it adds a no-code agent builder, orchestration, governance, MCP support, and AI Observability for LLM monitoring introduced at New Relic NOW in June 2026. The caveat that matters for procurement: most of this, the SRE Agent included, remains labeled Preview as of this writing. Applied Intelligence, which groups related alerts and generates AI summaries, is GA and genuinely useful.
Uptrace sends alerts via email, Slack, webhook, and AlertManager. The investigation from that point is manual. No AI SRE, no MCP server, no natural language query interface, no autonomous investigation. The platform's positioning is explicitly as a lean, cost-efficient observability backend rather than an AI-augmented operations platform, and that positioning is honest about what it doesn't do.
For engineering teams who have moved toward AI-assisted development workflows, the absence of an MCP server in Uptrace is a real gap rather than a theoretical one: there's no way to point Claude Code or Cursor at your Uptrace data directly. Every investigation requires opening the Uptrace UI rather than staying in your development environment.
| AI capability | New Relic | Uptrace |
|---|---|---|
| Autonomous investigation | Yes (SRE Agent, Preview Feb 2026) | No |
| No-code AI agent builder | Yes (Agentic Platform, Preview) | No |
| MCP server | Yes (Preview, Agentic Platform) | No |
| AI alert summarization | Yes (Applied Intelligence, GA) | No |
| LLM/AI observability | Yes (AI Observability, June 2026) | No |
| GA status of flagship AI feature | Preview (SRE Agent) | N/A |
New Relic has real AI investment, mostly in Preview. Uptrace has none. What neither one includes is a direct path from a root cause hypothesis to an on-call notification and a customer-facing status page update. Better Stack's AI SRE connects to the full incident lifecycle so the investigation and the response happen in the same place.
Autonomous root cause investigation connected to on-call, incidents, and status pages. See the AI SRE.
New Relic's Applied Intelligence groups related alerts and generates AI summaries before you've finished opening the dashboard, and SLO tracking monitors error budgets. On-call scheduling requires external tools (PagerDuty, OpsGenie) since New Relic's native On-Call product is an add-on rather than a core offering.
Uptrace sends alerts and stops there. Alert rules fire on metric thresholds, log patterns, or trace anomalies across email, Slack, webhook, and AlertManager. On-call rotations, escalation policies, phone delivery, and post-mortem generation all happen outside Uptrace, through whatever tools your team already uses. For five on-call engineers on PagerDuty Professional, that's $245 to $415 a month on top of the Uptrace bill, the same external dependency New Relic customers mostly carry too.
| Incident management | New Relic | Uptrace |
|---|---|---|
| Alert intelligence | Applied Intelligence (AI grouping, GA) | Threshold-based only |
| On-call scheduling | Via New Relic On-Call or external | Not available |
| Phone/SMS delivery | Via New Relic On-Call or external | Not available |
| AI alert summarization | Yes (Applied Intelligence) | No |
| Status pages | No | No |
This is where the comparison gets genuinely interesting, because the two pricing models produce very different cost curves depending on your team structure and data volume.
New Relic's bill has two independent inputs: ingest and seats. A team of 10 engineers who all need full platform access on the Pro tier pays $3,490/month in seats before a byte of data ingest applies. Past the free 100GB/month, ingest costs $0.40/GB. The seat model means cost scales with headcount in a way that has nothing to do with how much you're monitoring. The sharpest cost cliff in New Relic's pricing is the jump from Standard (capped at 5 full platform users) to Pro, where adding a sixth engineer who needs full access moves you to $349/user on an unlimited Pro tier — a jump that can double your monthly bill from a single hire.
Uptrace's bill has one input: data volume. No seats, no hosts, unlimited users, unlimited services. Cloud pricing runs $0.10/GB for traces and logs, $0.025/million datapoints for metrics, with volume discounts that kick in automatically and a hard cap that ensures the bill never exceeds what you've authorized. From Uptrace's own pricing comparison tool, a large engineering team setup (150 engineers, 225 APM hosts, 10TB of telemetry, 20TB logs) costs roughly $2,039/month on Uptrace versus $24,635/month on New Relic, a 12:1 difference driven almost entirely by the seat cost disparity at that team size.
Scenario: 20 engineers needing full access, 1TB/month telemetry
| Cost component | New Relic (Pro, annual) | Uptrace Cloud |
|---|---|---|
| Full platform user licenses | $6,980/month (20 x $349) | $0 (no seat model) |
| Data ingest (1TB, minus 100GB free) | ~$360/month | ~$75/month (traces + logs) |
| Metrics | Included in ingest | ~$25/month (1B datapoints) |
| On-call (5 responders, PagerDuty) | ~$245-415/month | ~$245-415/month |
| Incident management, status pages, error tracking | Applied Intelligence included; full product add-ons | External tools required |
| Estimated monthly total | ~$7,585-7,755/month | ~$345-515/month |
That gap is driven almost entirely by seat count. Flip the scenario to a two-engineer team running the same telemetry volume, and New Relic's seat cost drops to $698/month while the data costs stay roughly equal, and New Relic's DEM, AI investigation, and compliance coverage become meaningful differentiators for a modest premium.
New Relic does not offer hard spending caps that automatically halt data ingestion when you exceed a budget threshold. The platform provides data ingest budgets with configurable alerts at multiple thresholds, but these alerts do not stop the meter. Uptrace's hard cap does stop the meter, which is a meaningful operational difference for teams where cost predictability under adversarial traffic conditions matters.
| Pricing factor | New Relic | Uptrace |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier | Yes (100GB + 1 full user, forever) | Yes (50GB/month; unlimited self-hosted) |
| Per-user fee | Yes (Full Platform $349/month Pro annual) | No |
| Ingest rate | $0.40/GB (100GB/month free) | $0.10/GB |
| Hard budget cap | No | Yes |
| Cardinality penalties | No | No |
| Self-hosted option | No | Yes (free, AGPL) |
| Volume discounts | Yes (negotiated at scale) | Yes (automatic, down to $0.016/GB) |
Both platforms still leave a gap around on-call scheduling and status pages. Better Stack consolidates logs, metrics, traces, on-call scheduling, incident management, and status pages into one platform with one bill — and no per-seat model.
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New Relic is SaaS-only. All telemetry lives in New Relic's infrastructure, full stop. The compliance certifications are strong: SOC 2, HIPAA on Data Plus, FedRAMP Moderate with stated expansion toward High. For regulated industries requiring those specific certifications, New Relic is the only viable option between these two platforms.
Uptrace's compliance story runs the other direction: instead of certifications, it offers structural data control. The self-hosted Community Edition means telemetry never leaves your network. EU-based Uptrace Cloud runs in Hetzner's German data centers with Finnish backups, GDPR-compliant by design. Managed on-premises installations are available from $1,000/month excluding hosting. SOC 2 certification is available on request for on-premises customers. HIPAA and FedRAMP are not available on Uptrace at any tier.
The Grafana datasource compatibility matters for migration paths. Teams with years of Grafana dashboards built on Prometheus data can point those dashboards at Uptrace without rebuilding. New Relic doesn't offer an equivalent bridge for teams coming from Grafana-based setups.
| Compliance and deployment | New Relic | Uptrace |
|---|---|---|
| Self-hosted option | No | Yes (free, AGPL) |
| Air-gapped deployment | No | Yes |
| SOC 2 Type II | Yes | In progress (on-premises, on request) |
| HIPAA | Yes (Data Plus) | No |
| FedRAMP | Yes (Moderate, expanding to High) | No |
| GDPR | Yes | Yes (EU data centers by design) |
| Grafana compatibility | Limited | Yes (Tempo + Prometheus datasource) |
New Relic gaps worth knowing:
Uptrace gaps worth knowing:
The decision between New Relic and Uptrace is surprisingly straightforward once you identify what you're actually buying.
If your team is looking for a complete observability platform, New Relic is the stronger choice. Beyond APM, it includes infrastructure monitoring, logs, digital experience monitoring, AI-powered investigations, and enterprise features like compliance certifications and incident workflows. For smaller engineering teams, the generous free tier and relatively low user count can make the platform much more affordable than it first appears.
Uptrace takes a very different approach. It focuses on delivering fast, OpenTelemetry-native application observability without the overhead of an enterprise platform. There are no per-user licenses, which makes it particularly attractive as engineering teams grow. If dozens of developers need access to traces and application data, its usage-based pricing can be significantly more predictable than a model that scales with both telemetry and user access.
That simplicity does come with tradeoffs. Uptrace intentionally doesn't try to cover the entire observability lifecycle. Features like real user monitoring, session replay, AI-assisted investigations, on-call management, and enterprise compliance aren't part of the platform. If your organization depends on capabilities like HIPAA or FedRAMP compliance, New Relic is the clear choice because Uptrace doesn't currently provide an equivalent offering.
Ultimately, this isn't a comparison between two platforms trying to do the same thing. New Relic is designed to be an all-in-one observability platform, while Uptrace focuses on being an efficient, OpenTelemetry-native backend for traces, metrics, and logs. If you'll take advantage of New Relic's broader platform, the additional cost can be easy to justify. If all you need is modern application observability, Uptrace delivers exactly that, without asking you to pay for features you may never use.
Neither New Relic nor Uptrace includes uptime monitoring, on-call scheduling with phone and SMS, incident management, and customer-facing status pages as a unified product. Better Stack brings all of that together with logs, metrics, and traces, with usage-based pricing and no per-seat fees.
The full reliability lifecycle in one place. Start free, no credit card required. Try Better Stack.
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