New Relic Synthetic Monitoring vs Checkly

Free tier available

From $40 per month (indicative, Team plan by check runs)

The free tier is genuinely usable. Costs come from full-platform user seats rather than check volume.

Priced by check runs; browser checks cost more than API checks, and frequency multiplies the bill.

100 GB of data ingest and one full-platform user free every month, permanently.

Free plan with a monthly check-run allowance covering a small site.

Widely used

New Relic · since 2015

Widely used

Checkly · since 2018

• The most generous permanent free tier of any major observability platform.
• Synthetics, APM, logs and RUM under one bill and one query language.
• Scripted browser monitors use standard Selenium-style JavaScript.

• One Playwright script serves as both an E2E test and a production monitor.
• Monitoring-as-code fits GitOps workflows and code review.
• Excellent developer experience and clear, published pricing.

• Per-user pricing for full-platform access surprises teams that want wide visibility.
• The interface is dense and takes time to navigate confidently.
• Synthetics is less differentiated than Datadog's correlation story.

• Playwright-centric; teams on other frameworks get less benefit.
• Browser checks at high frequency across many locations get expensive.
• Not a full observability platform — no APM or log management.

Teams wanting an observability platform with monitoring included and a real free tier.

Engineering teams already using Playwright who want production journeys monitored.