Prometheus vs New Relic Kubernetes Monitoring

Prometheus9.1Visit New Relic Kubernetes Monitoring8.8Visit

Higher score Prometheus #2 in Kubernetes Monitoring 9.1/10 Free plan Free plan✓ 0 of 4 features Visit Prometheus

vs

New Relic Kubernetes Monitoring #4 in Kubernetes Monitoring 8.8/10 Free plan Free plan✓ 0 of 4 features Visit New Relic

• Prometheus fits best

  Core open-source Kubernetes metrics

• New Relic Kubernetes Monitoring fits best

  Teams wanting Kubernetes telemetry with a free entry tier

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Side by side

Feature	Prometheus 9.1/10 Visit ↗	New Relic Kubernetes Monitoring 8.8/10 Visit ↗
At a glance
Editor score	9.1	8.8
Ranking	#2 in Kubernetes Monitoring	#4 in Kubernetes Monitoring
Best for	Core open-source Kubernetes metrics	Teams wanting Kubernetes telemetry with a free entry tier
Pricing model	Free	Free plan + paid
Starting price	Free plan	$10/user/mo
Free plan	✓	✓
Free trial	—	—
Deployment	Self-hosted	Cloud, Self-hosted
Platforms	Web, Windows, macOS, Linux	Web
Support	Community, Docs	Tickets, Community, Docs
Integrations	8 integrations	780+ integrations
Built for	Small business, Mid-market, Enterprise	Small business, Mid-market, Enterprise
Features Prometheus 0/4 · New Relic Kubernetes Monitoring 0/4
Control-plane monitoring	Not checked yet	Not checked yet
Kubernetes logs	Not checked yet	Not checked yet
Distributed tracing	Not checked yet	Not checked yet
Managed Kubernetes support	Not checked yet	Not checked yet
Specs
Alerting channels	Not checked yet	Not checked yet
Data retention	Not checked yet	Not checked yet
Our review
Pros	PromQL supports selecting and aggregating multidimensional time series. Service discovery and HTTP scraping support dynamic Kubernetes environments. Alerting rules, Alertmanager, federation, and remote storage extend monitoring.	Correlates Kubernetes metrics, events, logs, and traces Free plan includes 100 GB of monthly data ingest Ingests Prometheus and OpenTelemetry telemetry
Cons	Local storage is single-node rather than horizontally scalable. Focuses on metrics rather than logs or distributed tracing. Effective deployments may require exporters and connected ecosystem components.	Standard limits full platform access to five users Standard and Pro charge per user, with data ingest overages Kubernetes Monitoring is part of a broader observability platform
Our verdict	Prometheus is an open-source monitoring and alerting toolkit for collecting numeric metrics and storing them as timestamped time-series data with labels. It is suited to infrastructure, application, and service monitoring, particularly in… Read the review →	New Relic Kubernetes Monitoring brings cluster, workload, container, and application telemetry into New Relic’s observability platform. It is aimed at engineering, DevOps, and platform teams operating Kubernetes environments, including… Read the review →

Strengths and trade-offs

• Prometheus — where it wins

  • PromQL supports selecting and aggregating multidimensional time series.
  • Service discovery and HTTP scraping support dynamic Kubernetes environments.
  • Alerting rules, Alertmanager, federation, and remote storage extend monitoring.

  Where it doesn't

  • Local storage is single-node rather than horizontally scalable.
  • Focuses on metrics rather than logs or distributed tracing.
  • Effective deployments may require exporters and connected ecosystem components.

• New Relic Kubernetes Monitoring — where it wins

  • Correlates Kubernetes metrics, events, logs, and traces
  • Free plan includes 100 GB of monthly data ingest
  • Ingests Prometheus and OpenTelemetry telemetry

  Where it doesn't

  • Standard limits full platform access to five users
  • Standard and Pro charge per user, with data ingest overages
  • Kubernetes Monitoring is part of a broader observability platform

• Prometheus9.1/10 · Free plan

  A strong open-source choice for Kubernetes metrics, with PromQL and flexible collection.

  Visit PrometheusFull verdict →
• New Relic Kubernetes Monitoring8.8/10 · Free plan

  Kubernetes telemetry spans metrics, events, logs, and traces, with a free entry tier.

  Visit New RelicFull verdict →