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Best Free Alternatives to New Relic Infrastructure

Stop paying $0.30/GB + $49-$99/user. Discover professional-grade tools that won't break your budget.

Category: Infrastructure Monitoring / APMVerified for 2025

Top Recommended Replacements

SigNoz

FREE

Best All-in-One Alternative

Why we like it

The leading open-source alternative to New Relic/Datadog; natively built on OpenTelemetry (OTel); combines Metrics, Traces, and Logs in one beautiful UI; runs on your own cloud (AWS/GCP) so you pay only for storage, not 'ingest markups'.

Keep in mind

Requires self-hosting (ClickHouse backend) unless you pay for their Cloud tier.

Netdata

FREE

Best for Real-Time

Why we like it

Unmatched granularity; monitors 2,000+ metrics per server *per second* with zero configuration; instantly detects anomalies; the 'Cloud' dashboard aggregates all your servers for free (freemium model).

Keep in mind

Great for 'Infrastructure' (CPU/RAM) but less powerful than SigNoz for 'Application Tracing' (code-level debugging).

Prometheus + Grafana

FREE

Best Industry Standard

Why we like it

The standard cloud-native stack; completely free; massive community support; Grafana allows you to build dashboards that look exactly like New Relic's; no per-user fees ever.

Keep in mind

High maintenance burden; you have to manage the storage and retention yourself.

VictoriaMetrics

FREE

Best High Scale

Why we like it

A drop-in replacement for Prometheus that uses 10x less RAM and storage; perfect if you have huge amounts of data that would cost a fortune on New Relic.

Keep in mind

It is a database engine; needs to be paired with Grafana for the UI.

Zabbix

FREE

Best for Traditional IT

Why we like it

The 'Old Guard' of monitoring; enterprise-grade and completely free; excellent for monitoring physical hardware (routers, switches, IoT) where New Relic struggles.

Keep in mind

UI feels dated compared to modern tools like SigNoz.

OpenTelemetry (OTel)

FREE

Best Strategy

Why we like it

Not a tool, but a standard; by instrumenting your app with OTel instead of the 'New Relic Agent', you can send your data to *any* backend (SigNoz, Honeycomb, Jaeger) instantly, breaking the vendor lock-in forever.

Keep in mind

Requires code changes to implement.

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