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.

New Relic

New Relic, one of the pioneering APM providers, has successfully reinvented its product to meet the requirements of a modern observability platform. The solution now provides insights into the software, infrastructure, and customer experience, offering businesses comprehensive visibility into their digital systems. New Relic's observability platform ensures that companies can efficiently manage system performance, understand customer experience, and accelerate software delivery.

AppDynamics

AppDynamics stands out with its tight integration of automation (AIOps) features with its Application Performance Management (APM) offering. The platform provides the ability to monitor and manage the performance of complex, distributed applications with a focus on ensuring optimal user experiences. With its solid marriage of AIOps and APM, AppDynamics provides businesses with automated insights and anomaly detection, leading to more efficient problem resolution and optimized application performance.

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“Gotchas”

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.

Feature Comparison

Feature

Use Case Fit

Problem Resolution

Pricing

Observability

Instrumentation

Integration With Other Services

Not all observability providers have the integrations or compatibility with tools and languages like Rancher, AlertOps, or Rust.

Compliance Requirements

Compliance with standards like PCI DSS, HIPAA, ISO 27001, FedRAMP and more have been tracked and recorded.

Helpful Links

Product Information

Pricing Pages

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About the Author

Louis-Victor Jadavji

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.

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