New Relic vs SigNoz
SigNoz is the pick for teams who like how New Relic works and cannot live with what it costs per person. It puts traces, metrics and logs in one OpenTelemetry-native product, charges for gigabytes rather than logins, and ships an MIT-licensed core you can run yourself. In exchange you give up the packaged extras around APM and a good deal of integration breadth.
Pick SigNoz if your services already speak OpenTelemetry, if more people need access than New Relic's five-user Standard cap allows, or if telemetry has to stay on your own infrastructure. Stay on New Relic if you rely on mobile monitoring, session replay, synthetics or its 2026 agentic incident tooling, or if you want hundreds of maintained integrations rather than a collector you configure yourself.
Side by side
New Relic vs SigNoz at a glance
| New Relic | SigNoz | |
|---|---|---|
| Bills by | Seats, GB ingested and compute units | GB of logs and traces, metric samples |
| Full access per seat | ✗ $349/user on Pro, $549 on Enterprise | ✓ $0, unlimited teammates |
| Seat ceiling on the cheap tier | ✗ Standard stops at 5 full platform users | ✓ none |
| Logs and traces rate | $0.40/GB, or $0.60/GB Data Plus | ✓ $0.30/GB |
| Metrics rate | Counted inside the per-GB ingest | $0.10 per million samples |
| Entry paid tier | $10 first user, then $99 each up to five | $49/mo base, usage-inclusive; $19 for startups |
| Free tier | ✓ 100 GB/mo, 1 full user, 8-day retention | Self-hosted is free; cloud is trial-based |
| Retention | 8 days, longer at $0.05/GB per 30 days | ✓ 15 days to 13 months, chosen per signal |
| Self-host / licence | ✗ none, SaaS only | ✓ MIT Expat core, ee/ under a separate licence |
| Query language | ✗ NRQL, portable nowhere | Query builder plus ClickHouse SQL |
| Coverage beyond APM | ✓ mobile, session replay, synthetics, IAST, AI monitoring | ✗ traces, metrics, logs, exceptions, alerts |
| Best for | One vendor for every signal, small teams | OTel-first teams that refuse a seat bill |
Sources: New Relic pricing · New Relic usage plan · SigNoz pricing · SigNoz licence. Compiled July 2026.
Where SigNoz wins
The bill stops tracking your headcount
SigNoz meters data and nothing else, with unlimited teammates and unlimited hosts on every plan. Take eight engineers ingesting 800 GB of logs and traces plus 200 million metric samples a month. On New Relic Pro that lists at 8 seats × $349 plus 700 chargeable GB × $0.40, so about $3,072 a month. On SigNoz Cloud the same usage is 800 × $0.30 plus $20 of metric samples, so about $260. Almost the entire gap is seats, which is why this pairing comes up the moment a team passes New Relic's five-user Standard ceiling.
OpenTelemetry is the native format, not an import path
SigNoz was built around OpenTelemetry rather than adapted to it, so there are no proprietary agents to install and nothing to re-instrument later. New Relic also ingests OTLP natively, which is exactly what makes the swap cheap: if your collector already exports OTLP, you change the endpoint and the header and your traces appear in the other product. Instrumentation you own in OTel form is the one asset in this category that no vendor can hold.
The self-hosted option is real open source
The repository is MIT Expat licensed, with the ee/ and cmd/enterprise/ directories under a separate licence. That distinction matters, because much of what is marketed as open-source observability is source-available under BSL or a vendor licence. Running SigNoz on your own ClickHouse means telemetry never leaves your network, which no New Relic plan can offer at any price, and it removes the 1.15 multiplier that New Relic applies to EU-region list prices.
Retention is a choice per signal
SigNoz Cloud lets you set retention from 15 days up to a year for logs and traces and up to 13 months for metrics. New Relic's default is at least 8 days, with longer history sold as an add-on at $0.05 per GB per extra 30 days, on top of the gigabyte you already paid to ingest.
Where New Relic still wins
New Relic covers signals SigNoz simply does not have. Mobile monitoring, session replay, browser synthetics, interactive application security testing and the 2026 agentic tooling around incidents are all New Relic products with no SigNoz counterpart, so a team that depends on any of them is looking at two vendors rather than one after the move. Integration breadth is the other gap: New Relic ships hundreds of maintained quickstarts, and matching that on SigNoz means writing collector configuration yourself.
The economics also favour New Relic in one clear case. Below five engineers, its per-user model is cheap and its free 100 GB a month is the most generous in the category, so a three-person team ingesting 120 GB pays $208 in seats and $8 in data. The equivalent SigNoz Cloud bill starts at the $49 base. And if you self-host to avoid the cloud bill entirely, you take on ClickHouse capacity planning, retention tuning and upgrades, which is a real ongoing cost that does not appear on any pricing page. Treat SigNoz's own cost comparisons as vendor claims and price your own volume.
Migrating New Relic to SigNoz
The path most teams take:
1. Get onto OpenTelemetry first, while still on New Relic. Replace New Relic language agents with OTel SDKs service by service and keep exporting to New Relic. Nothing breaks, and once this is done the vendor decision becomes reversible.
2. Fan out the collector. Add SigNoz as a second OTLP exporter so both platforms receive the same telemetry. This is where you find out whether your spans and attributes actually carry the context your dashboards assume.
3. Rebuild alerts before dashboards. Paging rules are what you trust on a bad night, so port them first, in the query builder or ClickHouse SQL, and compare firing behaviour against New Relic for a full cycle. Expect to pay both vendors during the overlap.
4. What does not move. Historical telemetry stays in New Relic until retention expires, NRQL does not convert, and anything built on New Relic-specific event types or Applied Intelligence configuration is rewritten. If you need mobile monitoring or synthetics, decide who provides them before you cancel, not after.
Common questions
FAQ: New Relic vs SigNoz
Is SigNoz a drop-in replacement for New Relic?
For traces, metrics, logs, exceptions, dashboards and alerts, it is as close as this category gets, because both products accept OpenTelemetry natively. If your services already export OTLP, you change an endpoint and an access token. What is not a drop-in is the packaged surface around APM: mobile monitoring, session replay, synthetics and the 2026 agentic tooling are New Relic features with no SigNoz equivalent, and NRQL dashboards have to be rebuilt as ClickHouse SQL or the built-in query builder.
How much does SigNoz cost compared to New Relic?
SigNoz Cloud charges $0.30 per GB for logs and traces and $0.10 per million metric samples, on a $49 monthly base that already includes roughly 163 GB or 490 million samples, with unlimited teammates. New Relic charges $0.40 per GB after 100 free GB, plus $349 per full platform user on Pro. For eight engineers ingesting 800 GB a month, New Relic lists at about $3,072 while SigNoz lists at about $260, and almost all of the difference is seats rather than data.
Is SigNoz really open source, and can I self-host it?
Yes, with one caveat worth reading. The SigNoz repository is MIT Expat licensed, except for the ee/ and cmd/enterprise/ directories, which are covered by a separate licence file. The core product you self-host is therefore genuine open source, not source-available, and it runs on ClickHouse with an OpenTelemetry collector in front. The trade is operational: you own ClickHouse capacity planning, retention and upgrades, which is the work SigNoz Cloud and New Relic both do for you.