# New Relic 10 Hacker News commenters recommended New Relic and 8 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 7 of 13 months. **Verdict:** Recommended for its NRQL query language, dashboards and generous free tier; the most common caveat is that it generates costly data and charges high per-seat licences. ## Why people recommend it - Better experience than alternatives (2 comments): "using New Relic or the like is just way, way better" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46970587)) "easily my best experience" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46937286)) - Clear performance metrics and dashboards (2 comments): "I miss NRQL every single day I'm building a dashboard" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45847488)) "New Relic tells me our Apdex is 99" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49842790)) ## What people warn about - Expensive data volume and seat licences (3 comments): "generating too much data which ends up being expensive but defaults definitely could have been better/more clear there" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45927769)) "their per seat license cost is super high" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45846137)) "I had to pay $800 for Sentry and a bit more for New Relic." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48130681)) - Pushy dialogs and frustrating interface (3 comments): "NewRelic insisted on full screen pop up dialogs prompting me for some form of feedback" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45841480)) "everything is just harder and more frustrating in ways that are hard to articulate" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45847682)) "which is actually offensive to me and weirdly aggressive for a corporate product" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47951428)) - Noisy alerts and maintenance burden (2 comments): "I'm not sure I would recommend it. Sure it was easy to install on all the server but now I keep getting alerts" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45847971)) "it was still a lot of work to maintain, and even then traces were not heavily used" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46503604)) ## Alternatives hackers recommend - [Grafana](https://hackerapproved.com/p/grafana.md): 71 recommend - [Prometheus](https://hackerapproved.com/p/prometheus.md): 48 recommend - [Datadog](https://hackerapproved.com/p/datadog.md): 40 recommend - [Sentry](https://hackerapproved.com/p/sentry.md): 31 recommend - [SigNoz](https://hackerapproved.com/p/signoz.md): 19 recommend ## Where to get it - [Visit the official site](https://newrelic.com/) ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "New Relic", https://hackerapproved.com/p/new-relic/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).