Obseria vs New Relic

Feature comparison

Obseria as a New Relic alternative: the short answer

New Relic moved from host-based licensing to consumption-based pricing several years ago, and it stores all telemetry in a single database queried with NRQL. Obseria is also usage-based and also keeps all signals in one store. If you are looking for a New Relic alternative, the questions to answer are therefore more specific: how users and compute are billed, how storage and retention work, how deeply each platform is built around OpenTelemetry, and where data can be hosted. This comparison is based on New Relic's public pricing page and documentation as of October 2026.

Pricing model: data plus users or compute vs. per signal

According to New Relic's pricing page, the platform has a perpetual free tier that includes 100 GB of data ingest per month and one full platform user. Beyond that, billing combines two dimensions. The first is data ingested per GB, with two options: the original data option and Data Plus, which adds extended retention, advanced log obfuscation and further compliance features at a higher per-GB rate. Storing data in the EU data center adds a per-GB surcharge. The second dimension is either user licenses (basic users are free, core and full platform users are paid per user, depending on edition) or a compute-based model that bills compute capacity units instead of users.

This model is easy to start with, and the free tier is useful for small teams and side projects. For growing organizations, the cost driver is often the number of engineers who need full platform access, or, in the compute model, query and processing load that is harder to forecast than data volume.

Obseria has one dimension per signal and no user or compute charge:

• Logs, spans and RUM web events: $0.060 per million ingested, $0.540 per million stored, 30-day retention.
• Metric data points: $0.020 per million ingested, $0.180 per million stored, 13-month retention.
• Synthetic API check runs: $0.20 per thousand. Intelligence agent credits: $0.60 each.
• Unlimited users with full access. Filtered data costs ingestion only. Every feature, including SSO and RBAC, is included.

The decision often comes down to team size. Small teams with modest data volumes can run on New Relic's free tier for a long time. Organizations where hundreds of engineers need hands-on access to traces and logs during incidents benefit from not having to manage user licenses.

Data model, storage and query

New Relic stores events, metrics, logs and traces in NRDB, its telemetry database, and exposes them through NRQL, a SQL-like query language that many engineers know well. Dashboards, alerts and the API all build on NRQL, which makes the platform consistent to use.

Obseria Lake is an index-free lakehouse with schema-on-read at petabyte scale, including field-level privacy controls. You can query it with OQL, a pipe-based language designed for step-by-step exploration, with PromQL for Prometheus-style metrics, or with SQL. Obseria Pipeline filters, enriches, masks PII and routes data at ingest.

fetch logs
| filter service == "payments"
| summarize count(), by:{level}

Teams that think in SQL will find NRQL and Obseria's SQL interface familiar; teams that prefer composing queries step by step usually find pipe syntax faster during incident triage.

OpenTelemetry and lock-in

New Relic supports native OTLP ingest and recommends it as the preferred method for sending OpenTelemetry data, with endpoints in the US and EU. It also maintains its own language agents and infrastructure agent, which many existing customers use.

Obseria is OpenTelemetry-native: OTLP is the primary protocol, semantic conventions are the data model, and you can export data via OTLP at any time. With existing OpenTelemetry SDKs, teams typically see their first trace within 15 minutes. The Obseria Agent, installed once per host, adds metrics, logs, traces, profiles and security signals, and Obseria TopoGraph maps apps and infrastructure automatically. On OpenTelemetry, both platforms are a solid choice; the difference is that Obseria has no proprietary agent path that features depend on.

AI and root-cause analysis

New Relic offers New Relic AI, a generative assistant that helps users write NRQL, explain errors and navigate the platform, along with applied intelligence features for alert correlation and anomaly detection.

Obseria Intelligence combines causal, predictive and generative AI. Agentic root-cause investigations run across the TopoGraph and Obseria Lake and return a chain of evidence that engineers can check. Agent credits cost $0.60 each, and customer data is never used to train AI models.

Data residency and compliance

New Relic operates US and EU data centers; according to its pricing page, EU data storage carries an additional per-GB charge. Data Plus adds compliance options such as FedRAMP Moderate and HIPAA eligibility for Enterprise customers.

Obseria stores data in the EU (Frankfurt, Dublin), the UK (London) or your own cloud account (BYOC). It is certified to ISO 27001, 27017 and 27018, SOC 2 Type II, BSI C5 for the EU region and TISAX, supports DORA, NIS2 and GDPR, and offers automatic PII masking, field-level access, audit logs and a 99.95% SLA.

Migrating from New Relic to Obseria

If your services already send OpenTelemetry data to New Relic, the switch is mostly an exporter change: add Obseria as a second OTLP destination in your Collector, compare both platforms for a few weeks, then remove the old destination. Services instrumented with New Relic language agents should be moved to OpenTelemetry SDKs one by one. Translate NRQL dashboards and alerts into OQL or SQL, starting with the views your on-call rotation uses most. The 14-day free trial requires no credit card.

Which tool fits you?

Switching in three steps

1. Add a second OTLP destination. Configure your OpenTelemetry Collector to send to both New Relic and Obseria during evaluation.
2. Translate NRQL views. Rebuild critical dashboards and alerts in OQL or SQL and compare results side by side.
3. Replace language agents. Move services from New Relic agents to OpenTelemetry SDKs one by one, then remove the old exporter.