New Relic vs Grafana: Observability & APM Comparison (2026)

An independent side-by-side comparison of New Relic and Grafana for observability & apm buyers — pricing, features, integrations, and how often each is cited by major AI engines.

AI Citation Scorecard

How often each is cited by major AI engines when buyers ask observability & apm questions. Last 90 days across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, and Copilot.

Tied overall — both at 100% cited across 12 probes.
ChatGPT
New Relic
1 / 1 probes
100%
Excellent
Grafana
1 / 1 probes
100%
Excellent
Perplexity
New Relic
2 / 2 probes
100%
Excellent
Grafana
2 / 2 probes
100%
Excellent
Gemini
New Relic
1 / 1 probes
100%
Excellent
Grafana
1 / 1 probes
100%
Excellent
Claude
New Relic
1 / 1 probes
100%
Excellent
Grafana
1 / 1 probes
100%
Excellent
Copilot
New Relic
1 / 1 probes
100%
Excellent
Grafana
1 / 1 probes
100%
Excellent
Scale:NoneLowFairStrongExcellent

Probes run hourly; each (engine × query) combo retests every ~3 days.

Pricing

New Relic
Starting price
—
Free tier
Yes
newrelic.com ↗
Grafana
Starting price
$19/month + usage
Free tier
Yes
grafana.com ↗

Key Features

New Relic
  • ✓50+ capabilities in one platform
  • ✓Unlimited free basic users
  • ✓100 GB of free data ingest/month
  • ✓Data retention of at least 8 days
Grafana
  • ✓All Grafana Cloud services
  • ✓Community support
  • ✓14 days metrics retention
  • ✓8X5 email support
  • ✓Pay as you go above Free tier
  • ✓Premium support
  • ✓Custom retention
  • ✓Deployment flexibility

When to choose New Relic

Choose New Relic if your team prioritizes its strengths over Grafana's. Full guidance populates as New Relic's feature data is indexed.

When to choose Grafana

Choose Grafana if your team prioritizes its strengths over New Relic's. Full guidance populates as Grafana's feature data is indexed.

AI visibility profiles

Is one of these your brand?

Get the full report by email: every observability & apm buyer question we ask, which engines name you, and who gets named instead.

New Relic

newrelic.com

Grafana

grafana.com

Free check

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We ask the buyer questions in this market across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Copilot, and show you who gets named.

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