New Relic vs Prometheus: Complete Comparison (2026)
Choosing between New Relic and Prometheus is a common decision for developer tools buyers in 2026. Both New Relic and Prometheus are established players, founded in 2008 and 2012 respectively. New Relic serves 16K+ orgs users while Prometheus has 3M+ users globally. New Relic differentiates with apm and infrastructure monitoring, while Prometheus leads with time-series metrics and promql query language. In this head-to-head comparison, Prometheus earns a higher hiltonsoftware.co score of 92/100 — but the right choice depends on your specific needs, budget, and team size.
Quick Comparison
Feature-by-Feature Comparison
Pros & Cons at a Glance
After comparing New Relic and Prometheus across features, pricing, and user satisfaction, Prometheus takes the lead with a score of 92/100 versus New Relic's 86/100. Prometheus's key advantages include "industry standard for metrics collection" and "powerful promql query language". That said, New Relic has its own strengths — particularly "generous free tier" — making it a viable alternative for specific use cases.
Both New Relic and Prometheus offer free plans, lowering the barrier to entry. New Relic's paid plans start at $0.35/GB ingest while Prometheus begins at Free. Evaluate which paid features — Browser monitoring, Logs (New Relic) vs Alerting, Service discovery (Prometheus) — justify upgrading for your team.
Bottom line: Choose New Relic if you need ops teams wanting unified observability across full application stack. Go with Prometheus if your priority is devops teams collecting and alerting on infrastructure and application metrics. Both are strong developer tools tools — we recommend trying the free plan of each before committing.
Ops teams wanting unified observability across full application stack.
DevOps teams collecting and alerting on infrastructure and application metrics.