Sentry wins on error-tracking quality and cost for error-tracking-only use; New Relic wins on full APM breadth, AI-driven insights, and broader integrations. Pick based on primary workflow.
| Feature | Sentry | New Relic |
|---|---|---|
| Best For | Best-in-category error tracking with developer workflows | Full APM with AI-powered insights |
| Pricing | Developer tier free with 5K errors/month. Team plan starts at $26/month, Business at $80/month, Enterprise custom. Event-based billing across errors, performance, session replay, and profiling. | Free tier available, paid plans start at $19/mo per host, additional costs based on usage and features |
| Error grouping | Stack-trace fingerprinting (category-leading) | Available in APM; less specialized UX |
| Distributed tracing | Integrated Performance Monitoring | Full distributed tracing across microservices |
| Feature | Sentry | New Relic |
|---|---|---|
| Error Tracking & APM | ||
| Error grouping | Stack-trace fingerprinting (category-leading) | Available in APM; less specialized UX |
| Distributed tracing | Integrated Performance Monitoring | Full distributed tracing across microservices |
| Auto-instrumentation | SDK-based per-language | Auto-instrumentation agents for major languages |
| Profiling | Python, Node, Go, PHP, Ruby, others | Available via integrations |
| Platform Breadth | ||
| Infrastructure monitoring | ❌ | Native with hybrid visibility |
| Session replay | Native with PII scrubbing | Not available natively |
| AI-driven insights | Seer AI for code review and debugging | AI and Agentic Monitoring across telemetry |
| SDK / integrations | 100+ languages and frameworks | 780+ quickstart integrations |
| Deployment & Pricing | ||
| Self-hosted option | Yes, open source under Apache 2.0 | Limited; primarily SaaS |
| GitHub integration | Native: suspect commits, PR links | Via integration |
| Billing model | Per-event (errors, spans, replays, profiles) | Per host + usage (data ingest, users) |
| Free tier | Developer: 5K errors/month, 1 user | 100 GB/month data, 1 full user |
Error grouping
Distributed tracing
Auto-instrumentation
Profiling
Infrastructure monitoring
Session replay
AI-driven insights
SDK / integrations
Self-hosted option
GitHub integration
Billing model
Free tier
Sentry wins on error-tracking quality and cost for error-tracking-only use; New Relic wins on full APM breadth, AI-driven insights, and broader integrations. Pick based on primary workflow.
Choose Sentry if:
Choose Sentry when error tracking quality is the primary criterion and you already have APM elsewhere
Choose New Relic if:
Choose New Relic when full APM with AI-driven insights matters more than best-in-category error tracking UX
Choose Sentry if:
Run both when budget allows: Sentry for error tracking, New Relic for APM and infrastructure
This verdict is based on general use cases. Your specific requirements, existing tech stack, and team expertise should guide your final decision.
Yes, and some teams do. The common pattern is New Relic for APM and infrastructure monitoring; Sentry for application error tracking with its superior grouping UX. Both tools accept events from the same application SDKs, so instrumentation overhead is minimal.
Yes, as part of APM. It groups errors by stack trace fingerprint similarly to Sentry. The grouping works well for common cases, but the triage and issue-management UX is less specialized than Sentry's purpose-built interface.
Sentry is meaningfully cheaper for error tracking specifically. A 5-person team using Sentry pays $26/month on the Team plan. New Relic's paid plans start at $19/month per host, so 5 hosts is $95/month minimum plus usage charges.
Sentry, yes, fully open source under Apache 2.0. Self-hosted requires Postgres, Redis, Kafka, and ClickHouse plus the Sentry services. New Relic is primarily SaaS with limited self-hosted options requiring enterprise contracts.