Sentry vs New Relic
Compare Sentry and New Relic side by side. Features, pricing, pros and cons to help you choose the right developer tool platform.
🏆 Quick Verdict
Sentry leads on error tracking depth and session replay. New Relic leads on full-stack observability with a generous free tier. Many teams use both — Sentry for code errors, New Relic for infrastructure metrics.
Overall Scores
Sentry
New Relic
Feature Comparison
Sentry Advantages
- ✓ selfHostable
Both Have
- = errorTracking
- = performanceMonitoring
- = sessionReplay
- = alerting
- = releaseTracking
- = sourceMapSupport
- = SDK Support
- = dashboards
New Relic Advantages
- ✓ uptime
- ✓ logManagement
Pricing Comparison
Sentry
Free starting
- free: Available
- team: $26/mo
- business: $80/mo
- enterprise: custom
New Relic
Free starting
- free: Available
- standard: $49/mo
- pro: custom
- enterprise: custom
Pros & Cons
Pros
- + Best-in-class error tracking with stack traces
- + Session replay to see what users did before errors
- + Wide SDK support (50+ platforms)
- + Strong open-source community
- + Excellent developer experience
Cons
- − Can get expensive at scale
- − Free tier has limited event quota
- − Overwhelming alert noise without tuning
- − Performance monitoring add-on costs extra
Pros
- + Generous free tier (100GB/month)
- + Full-stack observability platform
- + Strong APM capabilities
- + Excellent NRQL query language
- + Unified billing for all features
Cons
- − Expensive beyond free tier
- − UI can feel cluttered
- − Agent performance overhead
- − Steep learning curve
In-Depth Analysis
Sentry's error tracking is the deepest available. Stack traces with source maps, session replay to see exactly what the user did before the error, release tracking to correlate errors with deployments, and performance monitoring for slow transactions. For development teams triaging production bugs, Sentry's context density is unmatched.
New Relic's free tier (100GB/month, 1 full platform user, unlimited basic users) is among the most generous in the observability space. A small engineering team can get full APM, infrastructure monitoring, logs, and browser monitoring on the free tier without paying anything. This makes New Relic compelling for cost-conscious teams who want comprehensive observability.
Full-stack breadth differs. New Relic covers infrastructure metrics, Kubernetes monitoring, network performance, and synthetic monitoring (uptime testing) in addition to APM and error tracking. Sentry is focused on code-level errors and performance — it doesn't monitor your Kubernetes nodes or network latency.
The NRQL query language (New Relic Query Language) is often cited as a reason developers choose New Relic. It's SQL-like, making it intuitive for engineers comfortable with databases. Writing custom dashboards and alerts in NRQL is more approachable than Datadog's metrics query syntax. For teams that build a lot of custom operational views, NRQL's familiarity reduces friction.
Who Should Choose What?
Choose Sentry if:
Sentry: Development teams focused on error debugging, session replay, and code-level performance insights
Choose New Relic if:
New Relic: Teams wanting full-stack observability (APM + infra + logs) with a generous free tier and SQL-like queries
Ready to Get Started?
Try both platforms free and see which one feels right.