New Relic vs Grafana Cloud
These two platforms cover much the same ground, and they charge for completely different things. New Relic meters the engineers who look at the data, capped at five full platform users on Standard and $349 each on Pro. Grafana Cloud meters the telemetry and charges $8 per active user on top. That single difference decides the comparison, and it does not always favour Grafana.
Pick Grafana Cloud if more than five engineers need full access, if you are already on OpenTelemetry or Prometheus, or if you want the option of running the same stack yourself under AGPLv3. Stay on New Relic if your team is small and your volume is large: at $0.40/GB against Grafana Cloud's $0.55/GB all-in for logs, and with 100 GB free every month, a three-person team pushing terabytes pays less on New Relic and has nothing to assemble.
Side by side
New Relic vs Grafana Cloud at a glance
| New Relic | Grafana Cloud | |
|---|---|---|
| Bills by | Seats, GB ingested and compute units | Usage per signal, plus active Grafana users |
| Full access per seat | ✗ $349/user on Pro, $549 on Enterprise | ✓ $8 per active user |
| Seat ceiling on the cheap tier | ✗ Standard stops at 5 full platform users | ✓ no cap; free plan allows 3 active users |
| Free plan | ✓ 100 GB/mo pooled, 1 full user, 8-day retention | 10k series, 50 GB logs, 50 GB traces, 50 GB profiles, 14-day retention |
| Entry paid tier | $10 first user, then $99 each up to five | $19/mo platform fee plus usage |
| Log data rate | ✓ $0.40/GB, or $0.60/GB on Data Plus | ✗ $0.050 process + $0.400 write + $0.100 retain = $0.55/GB |
| Metrics rate | Counted inside the per-GB ingest | From $6.50 per 1k active series |
| Query language | ✗ NRQL, portable nowhere | ✓ PromQL, LogQL and TraceQL, all open standards |
| Self-host / licence | ✗ none, SaaS only | ✓ Grafana, Loki, Tempo and Mimir are AGPLv3 |
| EU pricing | ✗ list price × 1.15, plus $0.05/GB EU add-on | Same list price, EU regions available |
| Top tier gate | Enterprise seats at $549/user | ✗ Enterprise needs a $25,000/year spend commit |
| Best for | Up to five engineers, high volume, nothing to operate | Growing teams that want usage billing and an exit path |
Sources: New Relic pricing · New Relic usage plan · Grafana Cloud pricing. Compiled July 2026.
Where Grafana Cloud wins
Adding an engineer costs $8, not $349
This is the whole reason the pairing gets searched. On New Relic's Standard edition you may have at most five full platform users, at $10 for the first and $99 for the rest, so five people cost about $406 a month. The sixth person cannot be added at that price, and moving to Pro reprices everyone at $349 a year-committed seat, so six people cost $2,094 a month. On Grafana Cloud the equivalent line is $8 per active user, which means a team of twenty pays $160 for access and spends the rest of its budget on telemetry instead of logins.
The query languages are open standards
Grafana Cloud speaks PromQL, LogQL and TraceQL. Those are the same languages you would use on self-hosted Prometheus, Loki and Tempo, or on a competitor's managed version of them, which means dashboards and alerts you write in 2026 remain useful if you change vendor in 2028. NRQL is a good query language, but it exists in exactly one product, so everything written in it is a sunk cost the moment you evaluate anything else.
There is a real exit hatch
Grafana, Loki, Tempo and Mimir are AGPLv3. If Grafana Cloud's pricing changes in a way you dislike, the same stack runs on your own hardware with the same dashboards and the same alert rules. New Relic has no self-hosted edition at any price, so the only lever available when a renewal comes in high is negotiation.
EU teams do not pay a surcharge
New Relic's usage plan states plainly that accounts in the EU data region multiply the list price by 1.15, and that the EU Data Center add-on costs a further $0.05 per GB ingested. Grafana Cloud offers EU regions at its normal list price, so a European team lands roughly 15% cheaper on identical usage before any other difference is counted.
Where New Relic still wins
New Relic is one product, not an assembly of four. Guided installs, language agents, mobile monitoring, session replay, synthetics and the 2026 SRE Agent all sit in one interface with one bill and no components to size. Grafana Cloud's equivalent breadth is real but it arrives as Loki plus Tempo plus Mimir plus Faro plus k6, and someone on your team has to understand which is which. For a team without a platform engineer, that difference matters more than the seat price.
The pricing also genuinely flips at high volume. New Relic ingests at $0.40 per GB, or $0.60 on Data Plus, after 100 free GB every month. Grafana Cloud logs cost $0.050 per GB to process, $0.400 per GB to write and $0.100 per GB to retain, which is $0.55 per GB all in. A four-person team ingesting 3 TB a month pays roughly $1,160 in data on New Relic plus $307 in seats, against roughly $1,650 in log data on Grafana Cloud plus $51 in users and platform fee. Per-user billing is a tax on team size and a discount on data volume, so the direction of the answer depends entirely on which of the two you have more of.
Migrating New Relic to Grafana Cloud
The path most teams take:
1. Inventory first. Count NRQL dashboards, alert conditions, service levels and workflows. Instrumentation is the easy part; those queries are the work, and nothing converts them automatically.
2. Repoint the telemetry. If you already export OTLP, this is a config change: swap the New Relic endpoint and api-key header for Grafana Cloud's OTLP gateway credentials. If you run New Relic language agents, replace them with OpenTelemetry SDKs service by service and keep both exporters running during the overlap.
3. Run both for one cycle. Rebuild the top ten dashboards and every paging alert in PromQL and LogQL, then compare them against New Relic for a full billing cycle, including one real incident if you can. Budget for paying both vendors that month. Grafana Labs also ships an official New Relic data source plugin that queries NRQL from inside Grafana, which makes side-by-side panels easy, but it is an Enterprise-tier plugin and therefore not a free bridge.
4. What does not move. Historical telemetry stays in New Relic and expires with your retention. NRQL saved views, Applied Intelligence configuration and anything built on New Relic-specific event types do not come with you. Export the handful of reports someone will ask for in six months before you turn the account down.
Common questions
FAQ: New Relic vs Grafana Cloud
Is Grafana Cloud cheaper than New Relic?
It depends on whether your bill is driven by people or by gigabytes. Grafana Cloud charges $8 per active user against New Relic's $349 per full platform user on Pro, so a team of ten engineers saves several thousand dollars a month. On data it flips: New Relic ingests at $0.40/GB, while Grafana Cloud logs cost $0.050/GB to process plus $0.400/GB to write plus $0.100/GB to retain, which is $0.55/GB all in. A small team shipping terabytes can genuinely be cheaper on New Relic.
Can Grafana Cloud replace New Relic APM?
For traces, metrics, logs, profiles and dashboards, yes: instrument with OpenTelemetry, send to Tempo, Mimir, Loki and Pyroscope, and you get the same signals. What you rebuild rather than replace is the packaged layer around them, in particular New Relic's guided language agents, mobile monitoring and its synthetics suite, which in Grafana Cloud become Grafana Faro for front end and k6 or Synthetic Monitoring for probes. Expect assembly rather than one install command.
Can I keep my New Relic dashboards when I move to Grafana?
Not directly. NRQL does not convert to PromQL or LogQL, so every dashboard, alert condition and service level is rebuilt by hand. There is one bridge: Grafana Labs ships an official New Relic data source plugin that queries NRQL, traces and logs from inside Grafana, so you can run mixed dashboards during a transition. It is an Enterprise-tier plugin, which on Grafana Cloud means the tier that carries a $25,000 annual spend commitment, so most teams treat it as a migration aid rather than a permanent bridge.