Splunk vs New Relic pricing with cost per host against cost per user and which is cheaper for uptime monitoring
Short answer: Splunk bills per host, New Relic bills per user plus per gigabyte of data. Splunk Observability Cloud APM comes in the App & Infra bundle at $60 per host a month billed annually. New Relic Pro is $349 per full platform user a month on an annual commitment, with 100 GB of ingest free and $0.40 per GB after that. The two models cross at 5.82 hosts per engineer: below that Splunk is cheaper, above it New Relic is. On synthetics the answer flips completely. New Relic ping monitors are free and unlimited on every edition including the free tier, so for plain uptime checks New Relic is not just cheaper than Splunk, it is free. For scripted and API checks the two are built differently: Splunk includes API checks in its App & Infra bundle and publishes no per-check rate, while New Relic includes an allowance by edition and bills $0.005 per check after that.
US dollar list prices read from each vendor's own pricing page
alertping ▸ check preview
simulated
▸ type a domain to watch a check and an alert play out
▸ simulation of 2 regions · US East · EU Central
▸ 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 2/2 regions (US East, EU Central). Incident opened.
sms · on-call
AlertPing: DOWN. Confirmed 2/2 regions . First fail: EU Central.
Simulation, not a measurement of your site: this preview runs entirely in your browser and the latencies are generated from the domain you typed. Real checks on your monitors run from our US East and EU Central regions.
the short version
One charges for machines, the other charges for people
These two platforms answer the same questions and bill on completely different axes, which is why quotes for the same environment come back so far apart. Splunk counts hosts. New Relic counts named humans with full access, then meters the data those humans look at. Nothing about your architecture changes the Splunk bill except how many machines you run, and nothing about your headcount changes it at all. New Relic works the other way around.
That makes the comparison unusually predictable once you know two numbers: how many servers you monitor, and how many engineers need to open a dashboard and run a query. A four person team running forty containers pays Splunk a lot and New Relic very little. A forty person engineering org running six services pays New Relic a lot and Splunk very little.
Splunk Observability Cloud
$60 per host a month for the App & Infra bundle with APM, billed annually, with unlimited users. Predictable if your host count is stable, punishing if you run many small containers or autoscale hard.
New Relic
$349 per full platform user a month on Pro, with 100 GB of ingest free and unlimited hosts. Cheap for small teams with big fleets, expensive the moment access has to spread.
AlertPing
Neither. We do external uptime, SSL, port and cron checks on a flat plan from $49 a month, with 30-second checks from $59. We do not replace either platform and this page says where.
All monthly figures on this page use a 730-hour month for hourly meters and 43,833 runs a month for a check that fires once a minute, which is a 30.44-day month. Prices are US list, read from each vendor's published pricing page.
read this first
New Relic gives away the thing this whole site sells
We should say this before anything else, because burying it would make the rest of the page less trustworthy. New Relic includes ping monitors at no cost on every edition, including the permanently free one. Not a trial, not a capped allowance: ping monitors are excluded from the per-check meter entirely. The $0.005 overage rate applies only to non-ping monitors, which means browser tests, scripted browser tests and scripted API tests.
So if your requirement is literally "tell me when the URL stops returning 200", New Relic does it for zero dollars, Splunk includes it only inside a host bundle from $15 per host a month billed annually, and we charge $49 a month. On that one narrow job New Relic wins outright and it is not close. What you give up is the confirmation logic, the included SMS and the alerting behavior, which is a real tradeoff and which we cover below rather than pretending the price gap does not exist.
The other thing worth knowing about Splunk
Splunk now sells two overlapping APM products on one rate card. Observability Cloud APM is priced per host. Splunk AppDynamics, which Cisco sold to Splunk, is priced per vCPU. They solve broadly the same problem with different meters, and the sales conversation does not always make clear which one you are being quoted. Ask explicitly. The details are in our AppDynamics cost breakdown.
The other thing worth knowing about New Relic
The Standard edition caps full platform users at five. The first is $10 a month and each additional one is $99, so five users is $406. A sixth user cannot be added to Standard at all, so the whole account moves to Pro at $349 each. Six users on Pro is $2,094 a month, which makes that one extra person a $1,688 monthly decision.
the rate card
Splunk vs New Relic pricing, line by line
Every figure below is a published list price. Both vendors discount at volume and both will quote an annual commitment that does not appear on the public page, so treat these as the ceiling for a self-serve buyer rather than what a large enterprise pays.
| What you are buying | Splunk Observability Cloud | New Relic | AlertPing |
|---|---|---|---|
| Billing axis | Per host, per month | Per full platform user, plus per GB ingested | Flat plan, per month |
| Infrastructure monitoring | $15 per host (Infrastructure bundle), billed annually | Included, metered as data ingest | Not offered |
| APM | $60 per host (App & Infra bundle), billed annually | Included, metered as data ingest | Not offered |
| Full platform user | Not charged per user | Pro $349/mo annual, $418.80/mo pay as you go | Not charged per user |
| Entry paid tier for users | Not applicable | Standard, $10 first user then $99 each, max 5 | Starter $49/mo, 3 team members |
| Read-only or limited seats | Unlimited, no charge | Basic users free, Core users $49/mo | Included in the plan seat count |
| Data ingest | Bundled into the host price | 100 GB free, then $0.40/GB, or $0.60/GB on Data Plus | Not metered |
| Ping or uptime checks | Included in every bundle, no per-check rate published | Free and unlimited on every edition | Included, 20 monitors on Starter, 100 on Team |
| Scripted and API checks | API checks in App & Infra and End-to-End, no per-check rate published | 500 included on Free, 10,000 Standard, 1,000,000 Pro, then $0.005 each | Single-request assertions only, no scripted sequences |
| Browser synthetic tests | End-to-End bundle, or AppDynamics add-on at $12/mo per test location | Metered at $0.005 per check beyond the allowance | Not offered |
| Real user monitoring | End-to-End bundle, $75 per host | Included, metered as data ingest | Not offered |
| Bundle pricing | Infrastructure $15, App & Infra $60, End-to-End $75 per host | No bundles, edition plus ingest | Starter $49, Team $59, Business $189 |
| Fastest external check | 1 minute | 1 minute | 60 seconds on Starter, 30 seconds from Team, 15 on Enterprise |
| Free tier | No, trial only | Yes, 1 full user and 100 GB a month, indefinitely | No, trial only |
| SMS alerting | Via integrations, not included | Via integrations, not included | Included on every plan, not metered |
the break-even
The two meters cross at 5.82 hosts per engineer
Because one platform charges per host and the other per person, there is a single ratio that decides which is cheaper for APM. Divide the New Relic Pro seat price by the Splunk App & Infra host price: $349 divided by $60 is 5.82. If you run more than roughly six monitored hosts for every engineer who needs full access, Splunk's host meter costs more than New Relic's seat meter. Below that ratio, Splunk is the cheaper platform.
| Team and fleet | Hosts per engineer | Splunk App & Infra, per month | New Relic Pro seats, per month | Cheaper |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 3 engineers, 8 hosts | 2.7 | $480 | $1,047 | Splunk |
| 3 engineers, 17 hosts | 5.7 | $1,020 | $1,047 | Line ball |
| 3 engineers, 40 hosts | 13.3 | $2,400 | $1,047 | New Relic |
| 12 engineers, 20 hosts | 1.7 | $1,200 | $4,188 | Splunk |
| 12 engineers, 120 hosts | 10.0 | $7,200 | $4,188 | New Relic |
Two things bend that line in practice. The first is that New Relic's seat count is only the people who need full platform access. Basic users are free and Core users are $49, so an organization that is disciplined about who really needs to write queries keeps the seat number much lower than its headcount, and the ratio moves in New Relic's favor. The second is ingest.
Ingest adds a second break-even at 150 GB per host
New Relic's host count is free but its telemetry is not. Past the 100 GB monthly allowance you pay $0.40 per GB on the Original data option. Divide the $60 Splunk App & Infra host fee by that rate and you get 150: if a monitored host generates more than 150 GB of billable telemetry a month, New Relic's ingest charge for that one host has already exceeded what Splunk charges to monitor it outright. On the Data Plus option at $0.60 per GB the break-even drops to 100 GB.
| Billable telemetry per host | New Relic Original, $0.40/GB | New Relic Data Plus, $0.60/GB | Splunk App & Infra host fee |
|---|---|---|---|
| 25 GB | $10.00 | $15.00 | $60.00 |
| 100 GB | $40.00 | $60.00 | $60.00 |
| 150 GB | $60.00 | $90.00 | $60.00 |
| 300 GB | $120.00 | $180.00 | $60.00 |
| 1,000 GB | $400.00 | $600.00 | $60.00 |
Those rows assume the 100 GB free allowance is already consumed by other hosts, which is what happens on any fleet past the first machine or two. The practical read: New Relic is the cheaper platform for teams with many quiet hosts and few engineers, and the more expensive one for chatty, high-cardinality services. Splunk's flat host fee is the opposite bet.
synthetics
On synthetics the answer reverses twice
Synthetic monitoring is where these two rate cards behave least like the rest of the comparison. For plain ping checks New Relic is free and Splunk puts them inside a paid host bundle. For API checks Splunk needs the App & Infra bundle and publishes no per-check rate or allowance, while New Relic's overage rate is $0.005 per check. But New Relic bundles large allowances into its editions, so that rate only bites once you exhaust them.
| One non-ping check, once a minute, for a month | Checks fired | Included | Overage | Monthly cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Splunk App & Infra | 43,833 | No allowance published | No rate published | Inside the $60 per host bundle |
| New Relic Free | 43,833 | 500 | 43,333 x $0.005 | $216.66 |
| New Relic Standard | 43,833 | 10,000 | 33,833 x $0.005 | $169.16 |
| New Relic Pro | 43,833 | 1,000,000 | None | $0.00 |
| New Relic ping monitor | 43,833 | All of them | None | $0.00 |
Read the Standard row carefully, because it is the one that surprises people. A 10,000 check allowance sounds generous until you divide it by 1,440 checks a day. One scripted monitor running every minute consumes the entire Standard allowance in 6.94 days, then bills $169.16 for the rest of the month. On Splunk the same monitor rides inside the host bundle, with no published per-check charge. Pro's million check allowance covers 22.8 such monitors before any overage at all, which is why the sensible New Relic answer for heavy synthetic use is to be on Pro rather than to pay Standard overages.
Browser tests are priced on opposite principles
The Splunk AppDynamics browser synthetics add-on is $12 a month per test location, flat, however often it runs (on Observability Cloud, browser checks need the $75 End-to-End bundle). New Relic meters browser tests per check. At $0.005 each, $12 buys 2,400 New Relic checks, which is 40 hours of one monitor running every minute. Past about a day and a half of continuous one-minute browser checking, Splunk's flat location fee is the cheaper structure.
Both stop at one minute
Neither platform checks faster than once a minute, so the fastest detection either can give you is an average of 30 seconds and a worst case of 60. That floor is a product decision, not a pricing tier, and paying more does not move it. It is the one gap in both rate cards that a dedicated uptime tool fills.
Honesty requires one more point here, and it does not flatter us. If you already have a Splunk contract, uptime checks come inside the host bundle you pay for, and Splunk publishes no per-check charge on top. If you genuinely need three URLs watched and your bundle covers them, add them to Splunk. If you do not run Splunk, the entry cost is the bundle itself, from $15 per host a month billed annually, before the first check runs. Our pricing makes sense when you want 30-second checks, second-region confirmation and SMS on a flat plan, from $49 a month with 30-second checks from $59.
honest scorecard
Where each one actually wins
Splunk wins on
- Unlimited users at no extra cost, which matters in large orgs
- Predictable bills when the host count is stable
- Uptime and API checks included in the host bundle, with no per-check meter published
- Log analytics heritage and the wider Splunk security stack
New Relic wins on
- Free ping monitors on every edition, which beats us and Splunk
- A genuinely usable free tier: one full user and 100 GB a month
- Unlimited hosts, so containers and autoscaling do not inflate the bill
- Free Basic users for people who only need to look at dashboards
AlertPing wins on
- 30-second checks from $59, below the one-minute floor both share
- Every outage confirmed by a second region before anyone is paged
- SMS on every plan with a monthly allowance and no credit packs
- A bill that does not move when traffic, hosts or headcount move
alertping
The check that runs while you argue about platforms
AlertPing watches sites, APIs, ports and cron jobs from two regions, confirms an outage from the second one before it pages anyone, and includes SMS on every plan. Flat from $49 a month, with 30-second checks from $59.
buyer scenarios
Which one to buy, by situation
Small team, large container fleet
New Relic. Hosts are free, seats are what you pay for, and four engineers watching 60 containers sit far past the 5.82 ratio.
Large engineering org, modest fleet
Splunk. Unlimited users at no per-seat charge is the whole argument, and it gets stronger with every engineer who needs query access.
Chatty, high-cardinality services
Splunk, or New Relic with aggressive drop rules. Past 150 GB a host, New Relic's ingest charge alone exceeds the Splunk host fee.
Solo developer or side project
New Relic's free tier, without hesitation. One full user, 100 GB a month and free ping monitors is more than most side projects will ever need.
Heavy scripted synthetic use
New Relic Pro on allowance, or Splunk if the API checks in your App & Infra bundle cover the volume. If you are on New Relic Standard and running scripted checks every minute, overage is $169.16 a month per monitor.
You only need to know if it is up
New Relic free ping monitors, or us if you want second-region confirmation, SMS without credit packs and a 30-second interval. Not Splunk, which puts uptime checks inside a host bundle from $15 a host a month, when New Relic gives them away.
You already run one of them and get paged late
Keep the platform, add a 30-second external check alongside it. The reasoning is in our guide to uptime monitoring to pair with APM.
You are comparing more than these two
Start from the meter, not the feature list. We have the same breakdown for Datadog vs New Relic and Dynatrace vs Splunk.
plainly
What AlertPing does not do
We are not a third option in this comparison and it would be dishonest to present ourselves as one. If you are choosing between Splunk and New Relic you are buying application performance monitoring, distributed tracing, log analytics and real user monitoring. We build none of that and have no plan to. What we do is the narrow job of watching from outside and paging a human fast when it breaks.
Not in the product
- No APM, tracing, profiling or code-level diagnostics
- No log ingest, search or retention
- No real user monitoring or browser performance data
- No scripted multi-step API sequences or browser flows
- No server-agent CPU, memory or disk metrics
Also worth knowing
- No free plan, unlike New Relic, which has a real one
- 30-second checks start at Team, $59 a month. Starter is 60 seconds
- A custom status page domain is Business, $189 a month
- No white labeling, domain expiry or blacklist monitoring
- We sell SLA reports on Business, not an uptime guarantee
questions
Splunk and New Relic questions, answered
Is Splunk or New Relic cheaper?
It depends on your ratio of hosts to engineers. Splunk App & Infra, which includes APM, is $60 per host a month with unlimited users; New Relic Pro is $349 per full platform user with unlimited hosts. They cross at 5.82 hosts per user. Below that New Relic costs more, above it Splunk does. New Relic also bills $0.40 per GB of ingest past 100 GB free.
How do I save money on my Splunk bill?
Buy the bundle each host actually needs. Splunk bills per host, so a host on End-to-End at $75 a month that only needs metrics belongs on Infrastructure at $15, a $720 a year saving per host. Keep App & Infra at $60 for hosts that run APM, and move plain uptime checks to a flat monitor instead of paying for them inside a host bundle.
How much does Splunk Observability Cloud cost?
Splunk sells three bundles, per host per month and billed annually: $15 for Infrastructure, $60 for App & Infra (the cheapest with APM) and $75 for End-to-End. Synthetic uptime monitoring is included in all three, API checks need App & Infra, and real user monitoring and browser checks need End-to-End. The AppDynamics browser synthetics add-on is $12 a month per test location.
Does New Relic charge for uptime monitoring?
No. Ping monitors are included at no cost on every New Relic edition, including the free tier, and are excluded from the per-check meter entirely. The $0.005 per check overage rate applies only to non-ping monitors, meaning browser, scripted browser and scripted API tests, and only after the edition's included allowance runs out.
How many synthetic checks does New Relic include?
Non-ping checks are included at 500 a month on Free, 10,000 on Standard, 1,000,000 on Pro and 10,000,000 on Enterprise, then $0.005 each. One scripted check running every minute fires 43,833 times a month, so it exhausts the Standard allowance in under seven days and costs $169.16 for the rest of the month.
Can Splunk or New Relic check a site every 30 seconds?
Neither one goes below a one-minute interval on external synthetic checks, at any price tier. The practical effect is an average detection delay of 30 seconds and a worst case of 60. If you need faster, it has to come from a dedicated uptime tool. Our 30-second checks start on the Team plan at $59 a month.
What is a New Relic full platform user?
It is the paid seat type with complete access to querying, alerting and every capability. Basic users are free and can view and use core features; Core users are $49 a month for a middle tier. Standard caps full platform users at five, with the first at $10 and each additional at $99, so five costs $406.
Does Splunk have a free tier like New Relic?
No. Splunk Observability Cloud offers a trial rather than a permanently free plan. New Relic's free tier is genuine and indefinite: one full platform user, unlimited Basic users, 100 GB of ingest a month and free ping monitors. For evaluating a platform without a purchase order, that difference is decisive.
Do I need a separate uptime tool alongside either one?
Only if the one-minute floor or the alerting is the problem. Both platforms tell you why something is slow far better than we can. Neither checks faster than once a minute, and neither includes SMS. If you are being paged late or paying per message, a separate external check is worth the second line item. If not, do not buy one.
keep reading
Related comparisons
Dynatrace vs Splunk
Flat per host against $7.30 per GiB of RAM, and the 8.22 GiB break-even.
Datadog vs New Relic
Per host against per seat, and the point where New Relic's user cap bites.
New Relic vs Dynatrace
Seat billing against memory billing, and the six-hosts-per-engineer line.
Splunk Observability cost
The full rate card, worked bills, and the two overlapping APM SKUs.
New Relic cost
Ingest, seats and the traps in the Standard edition's five-user cap.
Best uptime monitoring tools
The dedicated uptime field, compared on interval, alerting and price.
Neither platform checks faster than once a minute
Checks confirmed from a second region, SMS on every plan, and no per-host meter. Flat from $49 a month, with 30-second checks from $59.