New Relic Synthetic Monitoring vs Dynatrace

Free tier available

From $0.04 per hour per 8 GiB host (full-stack, indicative)

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

Consumption-based pricing across hosts, synthetic requests, RUM sessions and log volume. Enterprise contracts are large.

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

15-day trial.

Widely used

New Relic · since 2015

Widely used

Dynatrace · since 2005

• 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.

• Automatic discovery and dependency mapping removes most manual instrumentation work.
• Davis root-cause analysis genuinely reduces alert noise in complex estates.
• Covers mainframe and SAP alongside cloud-native workloads.

• 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.

• Expensive, with consumption pricing that is hard to forecast.
• Heavy platform aimed at organisations with a dedicated operations function.
• Overkill for a straightforward web application.

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

Large enterprises with complex hybrid estates and a dedicated SRE or operations team.