Datadog vs New Relic: synthetic monitoring pricing, included checks and intervals compared
Short answer: both meter synthetic monitoring, but on different units. Datadog charges per test run, near $5 per 10,000 API runs. New Relic gives every edition a monthly allowance of checks (500 free, 10,000 on Standard, 1 million on Pro) and charges $0.005 per check above it, which is ten times Datadog's API rate per run. The twist that decides most uptime shortlists: New Relic's simple ping monitors are excluded from that meter entirely and cost nothing on every edition. Neither vendor checks faster than once a minute, which is where AlertPing sits, at 60-second checks from $19 a month and 30-second checks from $59.
Last updated August 2026 · US dollar list prices checked August 2026
alertping ▸ run check
live
▸ type a domain and run a real-feel check
▸ probes from 3 regions · FRA · IAD · SIN
▸ waiting…▌
queued probing▌
If ever goes down, you get:
Alert fired ▸ 2 channels · 6.2 s after first failure
AlertPing app
● DOWN : HTTP timeout confirmed from 3/3 regions (FRA, IAD, SIN). Incident opened.
sms · on-call
AlertPing: DOWN. Confirmed 3/3 regions . First fail: Frankfurt.
the short version
Two observability platforms, two different meters
Datadog and New Relic compete on the whole observability stack: APM, traces, logs, infrastructure metrics, real user monitoring and synthetics. If that is the shortlist you are actually running, the synthetic module is a small part of the decision and you should weigh the platforms whole. This page covers the part we know well and can check honestly, which is the uptime and synthetic monitoring piece, and what it costs on each.
Datadog Synthetic Monitoring is metered per execution. Datadog's billing documentation states the units plainly: it charges per ten thousand API test runs and per thousand browser test runs. List rates land near $5 per 10,000 API runs and $12 per 1,000 browser runs on an annual commitment, with pay as you go higher and overage running above the committed rate.
New Relic works the other way round. Instead of a pure rate, each edition carries an allowance of synthetic checks per month: 500 on Free, 10,000 on Standard, 1 million on Pro and 10 million on Enterprise. Go past the allowance and additional checks are $0.005 each. Those allowances are the number that matters, because the headline rate is ten times Datadog's API rate and would look alarming on its own.
Then there is the exemption almost nobody mentions. New Relic's documentation is explicit that the check limits "apply to all monitor types except the simple ping monitor", and that ping monitors are included in every New Relic edition at no extra cost. If all you want is a request sent to a URL to see whether it answers, New Relic will do that for free, forever, on any edition. Datadog has no equivalent: every synthetic execution is billable.
Both platforms also bill you for the telemetry those checks produce. New Relic includes 100 GB of data ingest a month and charges $0.40 per GB beyond it ($0.60 on the Data Plus option), and every synthetic run writes results into that ingest. Neither vendor's synthetic line item is the whole bill.
side by side
Datadog vs New Relic vs AlertPing
Figures are US dollar list prices published in August 2026, taken from each vendor's own pricing and documentation pages. Both vendors negotiate at volume and both show different rates on commitment contracts, so confirm current numbers before you buy. Ours are on the pricing page, and the wider field is on our uptime monitoring pricing comparison.
| Datadog Synthetics | New Relic Synthetics | AlertPing | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free tier | No standalone free uptime tier | Yes: 1 full user, 100 GB ingest, 500 checks, unlimited ping monitors | No, free trial only |
| How synthetics are billed | Per test run, no included allowance | Monthly check allowance per edition, then per check | Flat monthly plan, unlimited checks within the monitor count |
| Headline rate | About $5 per 10,000 API runs, about $12 per 1,000 browser runs (annual commit) | $0.005 per check above the edition allowance | $19, $59 or $189 a month, no meter |
| Included checks per month | None, everything is metered | 500 Free, 10,000 Standard, 1M Pro, 10M Enterprise | Unlimited within 20, 100 or 500 monitors |
| Plain uptime ping checks | Billed as API test runs | Free and unmetered on every edition | Included in the plan |
| Minimum check interval | 1 minute | 1 minute | 30 seconds (Team and up), 15 s on Enterprise |
| Do locations multiply cost | Yes, each location is a separate run | Yes, checks are counted per location | No, 3-region confirmation is included |
| Platform seat cost | Priced per host and per product, quoted per account | $10 first full user, $99 each additional (max 5) on Standard; $349/user on Pro annual | 3 to unlimited team members by plan, no per-seat fee |
| Data ingest charge | Billed separately by product | 100 GB free, then $0.40/GB ($0.60 Data Plus) | None, results retention is included |
| Scripted browser flows | Yes, recorded and replayable, runnable in CI/CD | Yes, scripted browser and scripted API monitors | No |
| APM, traces, logs, RUM | Yes, full platform | Yes, full platform | No |
| SMS alerts | Via integrations and paging tools | Via workflows and paging integrations | Unmetered on every plan, no credit packs |
| SSL certificate expiry | Yes, as a dedicated test type | Yes, as a certificate check monitor | Yes, on every plan |
| Hosted status pages | Yes, sold separately | Not a core product | 1 to 20 by plan, custom domain on Business |
| Best described as | Synthetics inside an observability platform | Synthetics inside an observability platform, with free pings | A dedicated uptime monitor on flat pricing |
the per-check math
What a scripted check actually costs on each platform
Per-unit rates are meaningless until you multiply them by a real schedule, so here is the arithmetic in public. An average month is 30.44 days, or 43,833 minutes. One monitor running every minute from one location is therefore 43,833 executions a month. New Relic counts checks per location the same way Datadog does: its documentation gives the example of a monitor running once an hour from five locations totalling 120 checks a day.
The table below prices non-ping monitors only, because those are the ones that consume New Relic's allowance. New Relic figures use the $0.005 per check rate, so read them as the cost once your edition allowance is used up. Datadog figures use the annual-commitment rates.
| Schedule (one monitor) | Executions per month | New Relic above allowance | Datadog API test | Datadog browser test |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Every minute, 1 location | 43,833 | $219.16 | $21.92 | $526.00 |
| Every minute, 3 locations | 131,499 | $657.50 | $65.75 | $1,577.99 |
| Every 5 minutes, 1 location | 8,767 | $43.84 | $4.38 | $105.20 |
| Every 5 minutes, 3 locations | 26,301 | $131.50 | $13.15 | $315.61 |
| Every 15 minutes, 3 locations | 8,766 | $43.83 | $4.38 | $105.19 |
Two conclusions fall straight out of that table, and they point in opposite directions, so it is worth stating both. First, New Relic's marginal check is ten times Datadog's API run: $0.005 against $0.0005. On raw overage rate alone, Datadog is much the cheaper place to run a high frequency scripted check.
Second, and this is the part the rate comparison hides, New Relic's allowances are large enough that many teams never reach the overage rate at all. A Pro edition allowance of 1 million checks a month covers 22 monitors running every minute from a single location, or 114 monitors on a five-minute interval. Enterprise covers 228 such monitors. Standard's 10,000 checks, by contrast, is used up in under four hours by a single one-minute monitor, so Standard is the edition where the meter bites.
The practical read: price New Relic on its allowance and your monitor count, not on the $0.005 sticker. Price Datadog on its rate, because it has no allowance to absorb anything. And price both on the interval you actually want, since halving an interval doubles the bill on either one.
For comparison against a flat plan: 100 monitors at a one-minute interval from one location is about $21,916 a month of New Relic overage, about $2,192 of Datadog API runs, and $59 a month on an AlertPing Team plan that also runs them twice as often. That gap is not a knock on either platform. It is what you pay for having synthetics sit next to your traces and logs, and if you genuinely need that correlation it is worth the money. If you do not, you are buying an observability platform to answer a yes or no question.
the detail that changes the answer
New Relic's ping monitors are free, and that reframes the comparison
If your requirement is plain uptime monitoring, send a request to a URL and tell me when it stops answering, then New Relic is the cheaper of these two by a distance that no rate table shows. Simple ping monitors sit outside the metered check limits on every edition, including Free. You can run them at a one-minute interval, from multiple locations, without touching the allowance.
That is a genuinely strong offer and we will not pretend otherwise. A team that wants free basic uptime checks and already has a New Relic account has very little reason to buy a separate tool for that specific job. Datadog has no matching exemption, so the same workload there is billable from the first execution.
The limits worth knowing before you rely on it. A ping monitor is a request and a response code, so anything past that, checking a keyword appears in the body, asserting a JSON field, walking a login flow, is a non-ping monitor and consumes the allowance. The results still generate ingest against your 100 GB. The interval floor is still one minute, so a ping monitor cannot detect an outage faster than that no matter what you pay. And the alerting is New Relic's alerting: you build conditions and workflows, and you route SMS or voice through an integration rather than getting them in the box.
So the honest framing is a split decision. For free or cheap basic uptime pings inside an existing account, New Relic. For high-volume scripted and browser checks, Datadog, on rate. For fast detection and alerting that arrives without assembly, a dedicated tool, which is the case we make for ourselves below and on our Datadog alternative page.
honest scorecard
Where each one genuinely wins
Datadog wins when
- You run high volumes of scripted API checks and the per-run rate is what matters.
- Browser tests need recording, replay and a place in the CI/CD pipeline.
- A failed check must link straight to the trace, log line or host metric behind it.
- You test private endpoints from inside your own network.
- Your team already lives in Datadog dashboards all day.
New Relic wins when
- You want basic uptime pings at no cost, on any edition, including Free.
- One free full user and 100 GB of ingest covers a small team outright.
- You are on Pro or Enterprise, where the check allowance absorbs real monitor counts.
- You want APM and synthetics from one vendor without per-host pricing.
- Predictable seat pricing suits you better than a per-host quote.
AlertPing wins when
- One minute is too slow and you want 30-second checks without a platform contract.
- You want SMS in the plan rather than assembled from an integration.
- The bill must not move when you add a monitor or speed one up.
- You want an outage confirmed from three regions before anyone gets paged.
- Nobody on the team wants to learn a query language to see whether the site is up.
What we do not do, stated plainly: no APM, no distributed tracing, no log management, no real user monitoring, no infrastructure metrics, no scripted multi-step browser flows and no scripted API sequences. If any of those is on your requirements list, neither this page nor our product is your answer, and you should be comparing Datadog and New Relic on the whole platform rather than on synthetics. We monitor whether things are up, from three regions, and we tell people fast.
pick by your shape
Which one fits the job you are actually doing
| Your situation | Buy | Why |
|---|---|---|
| You need free basic uptime checks and have no budget | New Relic | Ping monitors are unmetered on the Free edition, which also carries 100 GB of ingest and one full user |
| You run hundreds of scripted API assertions every minute | Datadog | At $0.0005 per run it is a tenth of New Relic's marginal check rate, and the volume is where that gap compounds |
| You already pay for New Relic Pro and want 20 monitors | New Relic | The 1 million check allowance covers 22 one-minute monitors from a single location before any overage starts |
| You are on New Relic Standard and want one-minute scripted checks | Reconsider | The 10,000 check allowance is spent in under four hours by a single one-minute monitor, so the meter runs all month |
| You own an SLA and one minute of detection is too slow | AlertPing | Both platforms floor at one minute. We check every 30 seconds on Team and above, and 15 seconds on Enterprise |
| You want SMS and voice alerts without wiring an integration | AlertPing | SMS, email, Slack and webhooks are unmetered on every plan, with no credit packs to top up |
| Your checks must correlate with traces and logs during an incident | Either platform | This is the whole reason both products exist, and no dedicated uptime tool replaces it |
| You need a customer-facing status page fed by your checks | AlertPing | Status pages are in every plan, with a custom domain on Business. Neither platform treats this as a core product |
questions
Datadog and New Relic, answered
Which is better, Datadog or New Relic?
For synthetic monitoring specifically, it splits. New Relic is better for plain uptime pings, which are free and unmetered on every edition. Datadog is better for high-volume scripted and browser checks, where its per-run rate is a tenth of New Relic's marginal check price. On the wider platform, both are credible and the decision usually comes down to pricing model.
How much does New Relic synthetic monitoring cost?
Each edition includes a monthly allowance of checks: 500 on Free, 10,000 on Standard, 1 million on Pro and 10 million on Enterprise. Beyond the allowance, checks are $0.005 each. Simple ping monitors are excluded from the allowance and cost nothing on any edition, so only scripted, browser and certificate monitors consume it.
Is New Relic free?
There is a genuine free edition: one full platform user, 100 GB of data ingest a month, 500 synthetic checks and unlimited simple ping monitors. It is not a trial. Extra full users are $10 for the first and $99 each after that on Standard, capped at five, and data past 100 GB is $0.40 per GB.
Does Datadog or New Relic do 30-second checks?
Neither one does. New Relic's monitor frequencies start at every minute, and Datadog documents one minute as the shortest synthetic test frequency. There is no faster tier to buy on either platform. If sub-minute detection is a hard requirement, both vendors are out regardless of budget.
Datadog vs New Relic pricing: which is cheaper?
It depends entirely on what you monitor. For uptime pings New Relic is cheaper, because they are free. For metered checks Datadog is cheaper per run, $0.0005 against $0.005. For a small team, New Relic's free edition and seat pricing is usually the lower total. At scale, the comparison turns into a data ingest and per-host negotiation rather than a rate card.
Can I use New Relic just for uptime monitoring?
Yes, and on the free edition it costs nothing thanks to the ping monitor exemption. The trade-offs are a one-minute floor, alerting you assemble from conditions and workflows rather than get in the box, no SMS included, and a platform whose interface is built for engineers debugging systems rather than for a quick is-it-up answer.
What counts as a synthetic check in New Relic?
One execution of one monitor from one location. New Relic's documentation works the example: a monitor running once an hour from five locations is 24 times 5, or 120 checks a day. Adding locations multiplies the count exactly as shortening the interval does, which is the usual cause of an unexpected overage.
Why is synthetic monitoring so expensive on these platforms?
Because the meter runs on executions, and executions multiply by interval and by location. A rate of $12 per 1,000 browser runs looks small until a one-minute test becomes 43,833 runs a month. Flat-priced tools charge for the plan, so speeding a check up costs nothing extra.
keep reading
Related comparisons
If New Relic is the one you are weighing, the two other sides of the same comparison are Splunk vs New Relic and New Relic vs Dynatrace, which works through seat-based billing against host-based billing and the point where the two bills cross over. If Cisco's platform is also on the list, AppDynamics vs Dynatrace covers per-core billing against per-gigabyte billing and the 4.52 GiB per vCPU crossover.
If Datadog is on your shortlist, the head-to-head against Pingdom vs Datadog covers the same per-run math against a flat-priced incumbent, and what Datadog synthetics cost works through the billing units in detail. For the wider field, see the best uptime monitoring tools roundup, and for the difference between these check types read synthetic monitoring vs uptime monitoring.
related comparisons
Keep comparing
- Datadog vs Dynatrace, where the per-action browser billing changes which vendor is cheaper.
- How much Dynatrace costs, meter by meter with three worked bills.
- Pingdom vs Datadog, a metered platform against a per-check uptime vendor.
“Our old tool paged me at 3am for blips that fixed themselves in a minute. AlertPing only pages when all three regions agree it's really down. I sleep again.”
SRE lead, payments SaaS
“I run 40 client sites. One dashboard, one status page per client, and SMS that does not cost extra credits. The math was not close.”
Founder, web agency
“We sell a 99.9% SLA. AlertPing's reports are what we attach to the quarterly review. Our biggest customer stopped asking for proof.”
CTO, logistics platform
Checks every 30 seconds, on a bill that never meters
No per-run counter, no ingest charge, no seat fee. Three-region confirmation and unmetered SMS, flat from $19 a month.