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New Relic and Sentry overlap in application performance monitoring, but they are built around different scopes. Sentry is worth evaluating when the priority is investigating application errors and traces; New Relic is a broader observability platform that combines application telemetry with infrastructure, logs, and digital-experience monitoring. Neither is a universal winner: choose based on the signals and incident workflow your team needs, then validate support and cost against your own workload.

How do New Relic and Sentry differ?

The practical distinction is scope. New Relic presents itself as a platform spanning application and infrastructure telemetry. Sentry’s materials center on errors, traces, and developer workflows for diagnosing application behavior. Both can help teams investigate performance problems, but their published capabilities do not establish that they are interchangeable across every monitoring need.

New Relic: broad observability coverage

New Relic describes a platform with more than 50 capabilities, including APM with distributed tracing, infrastructure monitoring, error tracking, browser and mobile monitoring, synthetic monitoring, log management, serverless monitoring, and AIOps. Its pricing page reports 780+ integrations; that is New Relic’s published count, not an independently audited comparison. See the New Relic pricing page.

Sentry: application errors and traces

Sentry’s integration catalog covers connections such as source control, deployment, project management, notifications, and data workflows. Examples include GitHub, Jira, Slack, Microsoft Teams, PagerDuty, Datadog, and Splunk; the catalog changes over time, so check the current Sentry integrations for tools your team uses.

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Sentry explains how traces can follow service and database calls, including messaging paths, in a January 2026 technical article. This describes the product workflow; it does not independently verify trace completeness for every language, framework, or architecture. See Sentry’s distributed tracing article.

Which should you evaluate for your monitoring needs?

Consider Sentry when application debugging is the main job

If your team primarily needs to find application errors, follow requests through services, and connect events to developer workflows, Sentry merits evaluation. Confirm that its SDKs and integrations cover your exact languages, frameworks, deployment model, and trace-propagation paths.

Consider New Relic when you want application and infrastructure telemetry together

If you want one platform to evaluate for APM alongside infrastructure, logs, browser or mobile experience, and synthetic monitoring, New Relic’s published scope is broader. Whether that breadth is useful depends on which signals you actually collect and how your team investigates incidents.

Do not infer feature parity from overlapping terms

APM, observability, tracing, and application metrics overlap, but they do not mean the same thing. Sentry’s Application Metrics announcement distinguishes application-level signals from infrastructure metrics such as CPU and memory; it describes connecting a metric spike to a trace. Ben Coe, the announcement’s author, wrote: “Metrics aren’t a replacement for errors, traces, or logs. They fill a specific gap: tracking interesting, well-understood events in your application with high fidelity.” The statement is vendor-authored and was published May 5, 2026. The announcement lists 5 GB of Application Metrics per plan; that is an Application Metrics allowance, not total data ingest and not directly comparable with New Relic’s monthly ingest allowance. See Sentry’s Application Metrics announcement.

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What do the published plans and figures show?

New Relic describes Free, Standard, Pro, and Enterprise editions and usage-based pricing. Its pricing page, last updated August 20, 2026, lists these figures for the Free edition:

Published item What the source says
Monthly data ingest 100 GB included in the Free edition
Full-platform users One included
Basic users Unlimited
Data Plus beyond included allowance $0.60 per GB
Integrations 780+ integrations, according to New Relic’s published count

These are New Relic’s published terms, not a guaranteed quote for a particular account. Check the current pricing page before budgeting. Its billing documentation describes data-plus-user and data-plus-compute models and identifies Core Compute as in preview; do not assume a preview option is generally available. See New Relic’s usage-model documentation.

Sentry’s May 5, 2026 Application Metrics announcement lists 5 GB of that product per plan. It is not a total ingest allowance. The available figures therefore do not support a direct, like-for-like price comparison between the products, and a current Sentry price schedule is not established here.

How should you compare the cost for your team?

A headline allowance or entry plan does not determine the cost of a real deployment. Estimate the workload and access model you need, then compare the vendors’ current terms:

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  • Telemetry scope: Decide whether you need errors and traces alone or also infrastructure, logs, browser experience, mobile, synthetics, and cloud-service monitoring.
  • Usage and retention: Estimate data ingest and the retention period your incident investigations require. Include any add-ons or checks you expect to use.
  • User roles: Count engineers who need advanced platform access separately from people who only need basic access.
  • Actual trace behavior: Check sampling, propagation across services and queues, span limits, and frontend-to-backend correlation using your architecture.
  • Stack support: Verify the specific languages, frameworks, versions, and deployment model in the live documentation.
  • Workflow and integrations: Test whether an engineer can move from an alert or error to the relevant trace, logs, release, and code context. Confirm source-control, ticketing, deployment, alerting, and incident integrations in the current catalogs.

Compare the resulting cost at your observed or forecast usage, rather than comparing New Relic’s monthly ingest allowance with Sentry’s product-specific Application Metrics allowance. Pricing and packaging can change, so verify both vendors’ current terms when making a purchase decision.

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What the available evidence does—and does not—establish

The published material supports a scope-based comparison: New Relic presents a wider application-plus-infrastructure observability platform, while Sentry’s materials emphasize application errors, traces, and developer workflows. It does not establish that either product is faster, more accurate, easier to deploy, or cheaper for a generic web application. There is no independent head-to-head test or controlled benchmark here, so validate the SDK coverage, integrations, retention, access model, trace behavior, and cost with your own workload.

Product prices and availability are accurate as of the date/time indicated and are subject to change. Any price and availability information displayed on Amazon at the time of purchase will apply.