New Relic vs Dynatrace: pricing, synthetic monitoring and how both compare to Datadog
Short answer: these two platforms bill on completely different axes. New Relic charges for people and data: $349 per full platform user a month on Pro, plus $0.40 per GB of ingest after the first 100 GB. Dynatrace charges for machines: $29 a month per host for Infrastructure Monitoring, or $58 per 8 GiB host for Full-Stack, with no seat fees at all. The rough break-even is six hosts per engineer. Below that Dynatrace is cheaper, above it New Relic is. For plain uptime checks New Relic wins outright, because its simple ping monitors are exempt from the meter and free on every edition. Neither platform checks faster than once a minute.
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
One bills per seat, the other bills per host
Most New Relic versus Dynatrace comparisons spend their time on agent architecture and AI root cause. Those matter, but they are not what makes one of these bills three times the other. The pricing model is, and the two models are almost mirror images.
New Relic prices on users plus data volume. Every edition includes 100 GB of ingest a month, then charges $0.40 per GB ($0.60 on Data Plus). Seats are the real lever: a full platform user costs $10 for the first one on Standard and $99 for each additional, capped at five. Cross that cap and you are on Pro at $349 per user on an annual commitment, or $418.80 per user paying monthly. Read-mostly staff can sit on a core user seat at $49 instead, on any edition.
Dynatrace prices on infrastructure and consumption, with no plan tiers and no seat fees. Hosts run $7 a month for Foundation and Discovery, $29 for Infrastructure Monitoring, and $58 per 8 GiB host for Full-Stack. Logs, traces and events ingest at $0.20 per GiB, metrics at $0.15 per 100,000 datapoints, and real user monitoring at $2.25 per 1,000 sessions. You can put your whole engineering org in the console without the bill moving.
That single structural difference decides most of these evaluations. A ten-person team watching a dozen containers should look hard at Dynatrace. A two-person team watching two hundred hosts should look hard at New Relic. Everything below is the arithmetic behind that sentence.
side by side
New Relic vs Dynatrace vs AlertPing
Figures are US dollar list prices published in August 2026, taken from newrelic.com/pricing, dynatrace.com/pricing and both vendors' own documentation. Both negotiate at volume and quote different rates on commitment contracts, so confirm current numbers before you sign. Ours are on the pricing page, and the wider field is on our uptime monitoring pricing comparison.
| New Relic | Dynatrace | AlertPing | |
|---|---|---|---|
| What you are billed for | Users plus data ingest | Hosts plus consumption | A flat monthly plan |
| Seat cost | $10 first full user on Standard, $99 each additional (max 5); $349 per user on Pro (annual), $418.80 monthly; core users $49 | None. Unlimited users on every configuration | None. Unlimited team members on every plan |
| Host cost | None as such, folded into ingest | $7 Foundation, $29 Infrastructure, $58 per 8 GiB host Full-Stack | Not applicable, we monitor endpoints not hosts |
| Data ingest | 100 GB free a month, then $0.40/GB ($0.60 Data Plus) | $0.20 per GiB for logs, traces and events | Included |
| Simple uptime ping | Free and unlimited on every edition, exempt from the check meter | $1.00 per 1,000 synthetic requests, so $43.83 a month per 1-minute check | Included, no per-check cost |
| Scripted and browser checks | Counted against the allowance: 500 / 10,000 / 1,000,000 / 10,000,000 a month by edition, then $0.005 each | $4.50 per 1,000 synthetic actions, so a 10-step script bills 10 units per run | Not offered |
| Shortest check interval | 1 minute | 1 minute (1, 2, 5, 10, 15, 30, 60) | 30 seconds from the $59 Team plan, 60 seconds on the $19 Starter, 15 seconds on Enterprise |
| Counted per location | Yes, each location counts separately | Yes, documented explicitly | 3 regions always included, no multiplier |
| Free tier | Yes, 1 full user, 100 GB, 500 checks | No, 15-day trial only | No, 14-day trial |
| APM, tracing, logs, RUM | Yes, the full platform | Yes, the full platform | No, none of it |
| Entry price for a small team | $0 to $109 a month | About $58 to $290 for a handful of hosts | $19 a month flat |
the seat cliff
New Relic's sixth user costs $1,688
This is the single biggest step in either vendor's pricing, and it catches teams that sized their budget on the Standard edition. Standard allows a maximum of five full platform users. The first costs $10 a month, each additional one $99. So five people cost $406. There is no sixth seat to buy. Adding one more engineer moves you to Pro, where every user costs $349 on an annual commitment.
| Full platform users | Edition | Monthly cost | Cost of the last seat added |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Standard | $10 | $10 |
| 2 | Standard | $109 | $99 |
| 3 | Standard | $208 | $99 |
| 4 | Standard | $307 | $99 |
| 5 | Standard (cap) | $406 | $99 |
| 6 | Pro, forced | $2,094 | $1,688 |
| 10 | Pro | $3,490 | $349 |
Pro figures assume the annual commitment rate. Paying month to month it is $418.80 per user, so the same six people cost $2,512.80. The practical workaround is the core user seat at $49 a month, available on every edition. Core users get a reduced feature set aimed at people who mostly read dashboards and respond to alerts rather than build instrumentation. A realistic ten-person team with two platform engineers and eight responders costs $698 plus $392, or $1,090 a month, instead of $3,490. Sizing that split correctly is worth more than any discount you will negotiate.
Dynatrace has no equivalent cliff because it has no seat fees. Whether three people or three hundred log in, the bill is driven by how much infrastructure you point it at.
the ram trap
Dynatrace Full-Stack is priced on memory, not hosts
The $58 headline is quoted per 8 GiB host, and people read it as a per-host price. It is not. The underlying rate is $0.01 per memory-GiB-hour, so an 8 GiB host is 8 x $0.01 x 730 hours, which is $58.40. Double the RAM and you double the bill. Infrastructure Monitoring, by contrast, is a flat $0.04 per host-hour, which is $29.20 a month whatever the machine's size.
That means the two Dynatrace tiers cross over at exactly 4 GiB. Below it, Full-Stack is the cheaper product. Above it, Full-Stack costs more than Infrastructure Monitoring and the gap grows linearly with memory.
| Host memory | Full-Stack per month | Infrastructure per month | Cheaper option |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2 GiB | $14.60 | $29.20 | Full-Stack, by half |
| 4 GiB | $29.20 | $29.20 | Break-even, exactly |
| 8 GiB | $58.40 | $29.20 | Infrastructure, by 2x |
| 16 GiB | $116.80 | $29.20 | Infrastructure, by 4x |
| 32 GiB | $233.60 | $29.20 | Infrastructure, by 8x |
| 64 GiB | $467.20 | $29.20 | Infrastructure, by 16x |
You are buying different capabilities, so this is not an argument for always picking the cheaper row. Full-Stack gives you code-level tracing that Infrastructure Monitoring does not. The point is that the decision should be made per host rather than once for the estate, and that a database server with 128 GiB of RAM is a $934 a month line item on Full-Stack. We worked the whole rate card through in how much Dynatrace costs.
the break-even
Six hosts per engineer is where the answer flips
Because one vendor bills seats and the other bills hosts, you can solve for the point where they cost the same. A New Relic Pro user is $349 a month. A Dynatrace Full-Stack 8 GiB host is $58.40. Divide one by the other and you get 5.98, so the two bills match at roughly six hosts per engineer who needs a full seat.
| Engineers needing full seats | New Relic Pro per month | Dynatrace hosts at the same spend | Pick Dynatrace if you have |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2 | $698 | 12 hosts | Fewer than 12 hosts |
| 5 | $1,745 | 30 hosts | Fewer than 30 hosts |
| 10 | $3,490 | 60 hosts | Fewer than 60 hosts |
| 25 | $8,725 | 149 hosts | Fewer than 149 hosts |
Treat this as a sighting shot rather than a quote. It ignores New Relic data ingest above the free 100 GB, it ignores Dynatrace log and trace consumption, it assumes 8 GiB hosts, and it assumes every engineer needs a full seat rather than a $49 core seat. Move any of those and the crossover moves with it. Push half your team onto core seats and the line shifts to roughly ten hosts per engineer. What the ratio is good for is telling you which vendor to model properly first, which saves a week of spreadsheets.
The shape holds up in practice. Container-dense teams with lots of engineers and few big machines tend to land on Dynatrace. Lean platform teams babysitting a large fleet tend to land on New Relic. And a third group discovers during this exercise that they were never buying observability at all, only trying to find out when the site is down.
synthetic monitoring
For plain uptime, New Relic is free and Dynatrace is not
This is the part we know best, and the honest answer does not favor us. New Relic exempts simple ping monitors from the synthetic check meter entirely. They are free on every edition including the free one, with no allowance to exhaust. If all you want is a URL polled every minute and an email when it fails, New Relic will do that for nothing, and it beats both Dynatrace and us on price.
Anything beyond a ping does count. Scripted API checks and browser checks draw down a monthly allowance that varies enormously by edition, and overage is $0.005 per check. A one-minute monitor executes 43,833 times in an average month, which is the number that turns those allowances into something you can reason about.
| New Relic edition | Included checks a month | What that actually buys | Ping monitors |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | 500 | One check every 88 minutes | Free, unlimited |
| Standard | 10,000 | One 5-minute monitor, with 1,200 to spare | Free, unlimited |
| Pro | 1,000,000 | 22 one-minute monitors from one location, or 7 from three | Free, unlimited |
| Enterprise | 10,000,000 | 228 one-minute monitors from one location | Free, unlimited |
Dynatrace has no free ping equivalent. Its HTTP monitors bill $1.00 per 1,000 synthetic requests, and its documentation is exact about the counting: one synthetic request is consumed each time a monitor runs, for each HTTP request executed, at each location. So a one-minute check from a single location is $43.83 a month, three locations is $131.50, and following a redirect doubles it again. Browser monitors bill $4.50 per 1,000 synthetic actions, where every click, navigation and assertion is an action, so a twelve-step script bills twelve units per run.
If you already run one of these platforms for tracing, the sensible move is usually to keep it and not to also buy an uptime tool. The case for a separate tool is narrower than vendors on either side admit: you want it when detection speed genuinely matters, when you need the alert to fire from outside your own cloud account, or when the people who need to see a status page are customers rather than engineers.
the interval floor
Neither one checks faster than once a minute
New Relic documents EVERY_MINUTE as its shortest synthetic monitor period. Dynatrace lists HTTP monitor frequencies of 1, 2, 5, 10, 15, 30 or 60 minutes, plus on demand. Datadog documents the same one-minute floor, which we worked through on our Datadog vs Dynatrace comparison. All three of the big observability platforms stop at the same place, and no tier or contract buys you faster. This is a product decision, not a budget question.
Average detection latency is roughly half the check interval, plus whatever confirmation logic runs before anyone is paged. On a one-minute schedule a typical outage is already 30 seconds old before the first failed check. Against a 99.99% target the entire monthly error budget is 4 minutes and 23 seconds, so a minute of detection lag spends a quarter of it before the page fires. The full arithmetic is under SLA monitoring.
For plenty of teams that is fine. If you are watching an internal service against a 99.5% target, a minute of lag is noise and you should not pay anyone to remove it. It is simply worth knowing before you sign rather than after.
honest scorecard
Where each one genuinely wins
We sell an uptime monitor, so read this as interested but checkable. Everything here can be verified against the vendors' own documentation.
New Relic wins on
- Free simple ping monitors on every edition, exempt from the check meter. Nobody else in this comparison, us included, gives you that.
- A genuinely usable free tier: one full user, 100 GB of ingest a month and 500 checks.
- Cost predictability for small teams watching large fleets, because hosts do not carry a per-machine price.
- The $49 core user seat, which lets responders in without paying full platform rates.
- One consolidated query language across metrics, events, logs and traces.
Dynatrace wins on
- No seat fees at all, so a large engineering org costs the same to onboard as a small one.
- Automatic topology discovery. The agent maps dependencies without anyone drawing them.
- Davis AI root cause, which tries to name the failing component rather than hand you dashboards to correlate.
- Depth on complex older enterprise stacks, including mainframe and SAP.
- A published, granular rate card you can model a bill from before talking to sales.
AlertPing wins on
- Detection speed. 30-second checks on the $59 Team plan and 15 seconds on Enterprise, which neither platform sells at any price.
- Flat pricing. Adding monitors, regions or teammates does not move the bill.
- Three-region confirmation before alerting, so a single flaky probe does not page anyone.
- Unmetered SMS on every plan rather than a credit bundle.
- Setup measured in minutes, with no agent to deploy.
the honest part
We do not replace either platform
If you are comparing New Relic and Dynatrace seriously, you are buying observability, and we are not an observability platform. AlertPing has no APM, no distributed tracing, no log management, no real user monitoring, no code-level profiling, no infrastructure metrics and no AI root cause analysis. When your checkout breaks, we will tell you fast and from three regions. We will not tell you which database query caused it. Both of these vendors will.
We also do not do scripted multi-step browser journeys, page speed scoring, domain expiry, blacklist monitoring, server agent metrics or white labeling. There is no free plan. If any of that is on your requirements list, one of the platforms above is the right purchase and this page has done its job by telling you so.
Where we fit is alongside. Plenty of teams run a full platform for diagnosis and a small external monitor for detection, because a probe running inside the same cloud account that just failed is not an independent witness. That pairing costs $19 a month and is the whole reason this page exists.
which to buy
Seven situations and the answer for each
Ten engineers, fifteen containers
Dynatrace. Ten New Relic Pro seats is $3,490 a month before ingest. Fifteen 8 GiB hosts on Dynatrace is $876, and everyone gets access.
Two platform engineers, 200 VMs
New Relic. Two Pro seats is $698. Two hundred 8 GiB hosts on Dynatrace Full-Stack is $11,680, or $5,840 on Infrastructure Monitoring.
You only want to know when the site is down
Neither, and not us either at first. New Relic's free ping monitors cost nothing. Move to a dedicated tool when you need sub-minute detection, independent probes or a customer-facing status page.
You are at five New Relic users and hiring
Price the sixth seat before you commit. It is $1,688 a month, not $99. Check whether core seats at $49 cover the new people, and get a Dynatrace quote as leverage.
Memory-heavy database fleet
Watch the Dynatrace RAM rate. A 128 GiB machine is $934 a month on Full-Stack and $29.20 on Infrastructure Monitoring. Decide per host, not once for the estate.
Sub-minute detection is a hard requirement
Neither platform qualifies, at any budget. Both floor at one minute. Pair whichever platform you prefer with an external monitor that runs faster.
Mainframe or SAP in the estate
Dynatrace, comfortably. Its coverage of older enterprise stacks is the strongest in this comparison and is a large part of what the price buys.
Startup with no budget yet
New Relic's free edition, then reassess. One full user, 100 GB of ingest and free ping monitors covers a surprising amount before anything has to be paid for.
questions
New Relic vs Dynatrace, answered
New Relic vs Dynatrace: which is better?
It depends on the ratio of hosts to engineers, not on quality. Dynatrace is stronger on automatic discovery, AI root cause and legacy enterprise stacks, and charges no seat fees. New Relic is stronger on cost predictability for small teams watching large fleets, and has a real free tier. Roughly six hosts per engineer is where the bills cross.
New Relic vs Dynatrace pricing: which is cheaper?
Neither, consistently. New Relic bills $349 per full platform user a month on Pro plus $0.40 per GB of ingest over 100 GB. Dynatrace bills $29 per host for Infrastructure Monitoring or $58 per 8 GiB host for Full-Stack, with unlimited users. Few engineers and many hosts favors New Relic. Many engineers and few hosts favors Dynatrace.
How much does New Relic cost per user?
A full platform user is $10 for the first on Standard and $99 for each additional, capped at five users. On Pro it is $349 per user on an annual commitment or $418.80 paying monthly. Core users are $49 on any edition. Enterprise is quoted by sales.
Does Dynatrace charge per user?
No. Dynatrace has no seat licensing. Its rate card is built on hosts and consumption units, so adding people to the console costs nothing. This is the clearest structural advantage it holds over New Relic and it grows with the size of your engineering team.
Does New Relic or Dynatrace do 30-second checks?
Neither does. New Relic documents EVERY_MINUTE as its shortest synthetic period, and Dynatrace lists 1, 2, 5, 10, 15, 30 and 60 minute frequencies. One minute is the floor on both, and no tier or contract changes it. Datadog shares the same limit.
Are New Relic ping monitors really free?
Yes. Simple ping monitors are exempt from the synthetic check meter on every edition, including the free one, with no allowance to exhaust. Scripted API checks and browser checks do count, drawing on 500, 10,000, 1,000,000 or 10,000,000 checks a month by edition, then $0.005 each.
New Relic vs Dynatrace vs Datadog: how do the three compare?
All three are full observability platforms and all three floor at one minute. They differ on billing axis: New Relic on users and ingest, Dynatrace on hosts and consumption, Datadog on a per-product mix with per-run synthetics. New Relic is cheapest for plain uptime because pings are free.
Can I use Dynatrace just for uptime monitoring?
Technically yes with HTTP monitors, but the economics are poor. A single one-minute check from one location is $43.83 a month, three locations is $131.50, and you still get a slower interval than a $19 flat plan. Dynatrace earns its price on tracing and root cause, not on pinging a URL.
What is the cheapest way to run New Relic for a team of ten?
Split the seats. Ten Pro full users is $3,490 a month. Two full users plus eight core users at $49 is $1,090 for the same headcount. Core seats suit people who read dashboards and respond to alerts rather than build instrumentation, which describes most of a typical on-call rotation.
Why is Dynatrace Full-Stack more expensive on big machines?
Because it is billed at $0.01 per memory-GiB-hour rather than per host. An 8 GiB host is $58.40 a month and a 32 GiB host is $233.60. Infrastructure Monitoring is a flat $29.20 whatever the size, so the two tiers cross over at exactly 4 GiB of RAM.
keep reading
Related comparisons
- AppDynamics vs Dynatrace pricing, per-core billing against per-gigabyte billing and the 4.52 GiB crossover.
- Dynatrace vs Splunk pricing, flat per-host billing against per-gigabyte and the 7.53 GiB crossover.
- Splunk vs New Relic pricing, per-host billing against per-seat billing and the 6.35 hosts per engineer break-even.
- Datadog vs Dynatrace pricing, including the per-action versus per-run browser billing flip.
- Datadog vs New Relic synthetics pricing, the third side of this triangle.
- How much New Relic costs, the full edition and seat breakdown.
- How much Dynatrace costs, the whole consumption rate card.
- Best uptime monitoring tools, the full roundup with pricing.
- Uptime monitoring pricing compared across fifteen vendors.
- Synthetic monitoring vs uptime monitoring, what you are actually buying with each.
- API monitoring with assertions, our own status code, keyword and JSON path checks.
“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
Detection speed neither platform sells
Checks confirmed from three regions, SMS on every plan, flat from $19 a month with no seats and no metering. 30-second checks from $59. Running in under a minute.