New Relic vs. AppDynamics Comparison

Who should you choose and why?

🤔 Strongly consider New Relic over AppDynamics if

• Your environment and ingested data are small or medium-size.

🤔 Strongly consider AppDynamics over New Relic if

• You want roll-back or automatic configuration changes to resolve incidents faster.
• You have a complex hybrid application and/or need to deploy on-premises.

📝Other Notes

• New Relic is free for under 100 GB of telemetry ingested, so it’s great for small businesses compared to many other big APMs out there.
• AppDynamics and New Relic are suitable if you want infrastructure monitoring tightly integrated with your APM.
• While suitable for complex hybrid enterprise environments, New Relic does not offer a sales process and customer support as suitable as AppDynamics for how most enterprises want to procure and get maintenance for cloud services. To be clear, New Relic is still OK at this relative to the rest of the field.

1. "Gotchas"
2. Feature comparison
3. Integration with other services
4. Compliance concerns
5. Helpful links

• New Relic’s dashboard query language looks useful but lacks critical functions like multiple data sets or advanced calculations.
• It’s usually difficult to predict pricing for New Relic, given its pricing is based on data ingested, so if you want to see your performance metrics next to your application logs, adding the latter could easily increase your costs by 5-10x. On the other hand, a big feature benefit of New Relic is that you can get your logs in the same context as your traces and transactions.

Product Information

• New Relic APM Product Page
• AppDynamics APM Product Page

Pricing Pages

• New Relic Pricing Page
• AppDynamics Pricing Page

Louis-Victor Jadavji (or "LV") is a recognized leader in the cloud services industry. He's helped 50+ digital native companies like ModusBox, Later, and NS1 choose the right cloud stack for their applications. His work has been featured in Forbes (30 Under 30 All-Star), HuffPost, The New York Times, The Globe and Mail, and Inc. Magazine.