New Relic alternative: Vigil
Teams look for a New Relic alternative when the second and third engineers need full-platform access and the bill jumps from $10 to hundreds. Vigil charges $10/month for five seats with everything unlocked, includes status pages, and keeps server metrics, logs, Kubernetes and RUM. Keep New Relic if distributed tracing is your daily tool.
Why people look for a New Relic alternative
New Relic pricing September 2026
- Free: 100 GB of data ingest a month, one full-platform user, unlimited basic users, 500 synthetic checks.
- Data beyond 100 GB: $0.40/GB (Original) or $0.60/GB (Data Plus).
- Users: Basic $0; Core $49 per user per month; Full Platform on Standard $10 for the first user then $99 per additional user (max 5); Full Platform on Pro $349 per user per month (annual) or $418.80 monthly; Enterprise on request.
Source: as of September 2026, from newrelic.com/pricing. Vendors change prices; the New Relic site is authoritative.
Vigil pricing
- Free: 10 monitors, 1 server, 1 status page, 7 days of history, Telegram/Slack/Discord alerts. Free forever.
- Pro $10/month: 100 monitors at 1-minute intervals, 5 servers, 5 seats, 5 status pages with custom domain, password and white-label, 1M log lines, 3 Kubernetes clusters, RUM, 100 AI analyses. 10-day trial, no card.
- Enterprise $25/month: 500 monitors, 50 servers, unlimited seats, SSO, SLOs, private locations, 1-year history. 30-day trial.
- Self-hosted $49/month per instance on your own server or air-gapped network.
- Add-ons from $2: +25 monitors, +5 servers ($3), +5 seats, +5 status pages, +1M log lines.
Flat monthly prices, no per-host, per-GB or per-run meters. Full plan matrix.
Feature and price comparison
✓ included · ~ partial or paid add-on · ✕ not offered. Vigil figures are for the $10 Pro plan unless stated.
| New Relic | Vigil | |
|---|---|---|
| Uptime / API monitors and fastest interval | ~ Synthetic checks: 500/month free, then metered. Ping, API, scripted browser | ✓ 10 Free / 100 Pro / 500 Enterprise. 1-minute checks on paid plans, 11 monitor types (uptime, API assertions, multi-step flows, heartbeats, TCP, domain/DNS, app health, dependency, change, price, keyword) |
| Servers (infrastructure agent) | ✓ Infrastructure agent; cost comes through GB ingested | ✓ 1 / 5 / 50 servers included. Single-file agent for Linux and macOS: CPU, memory, disks, network, processes, services, Docker, packages, vulnerabilities, disk forecasts |
| Logs | ✓ Included in the 100 GB, then $0.40–0.60/GB | ✓ 100k / 1M / 5M lines included. File and journald shipping, full-text search, live tail, log-alert rules |
| APM / traces | ✓ Full APM with distributed tracing, one of the best | ~ Endpoint latency and 5xx rates, request traces and a service map through the agent's Python and Node SDKs. Not a full APM: no profiling, no distributed tracing across other languages |
| Kubernetes | ✓ Kubernetes integration and cluster explorer | ✓ 3 clusters on Pro, unlimited on Enterprise. DaemonSet manifest; incidents for CrashLoopBackOff, OOMKilled, NotReady, pressure |
| Real User Monitoring | ✓ Browser monitoring with Core Web Vitals and session traces | ✓ Web Vitals p75, page views, JS errors. 1 site Free, 5 sites / 500k views Pro, 50 sites / 5M views Enterprise |
| Status pages: private, custom domain, white-label | ✕ No customer-facing status pages | ✓ Private by default, password or private-link sharing, custom domain with automatic HTTPS, white-label and custom CSS on Pro. 1 / 5 / 50 pages |
| Team seats | ~ One full user free; $99 per extra full user on Standard, $349 on Pro; $49 for Core; basic users free but limited to basic views | ✓ 1 Free, 5 Pro, unlimited Enterprise. Owner / admin / member / viewer roles, +5 seats for $2 |
| Alert channels (incl. Telegram) | ✓ Slack, PagerDuty, email, webhooks, Teams; Telegram via webhook | ✓ Telegram, Slack, Discord, Teams, Google Chat, Matrix, ntfy, Gotify, Pushover, webhooks (HMAC, templates), email. Tickets to PagerDuty, Opsgenie, Jira, ServiceNow, Zendesk on paid plans. No SMS or phone calls |
| Self-hosted option | ✕ SaaS only | ✓ Full product on your server or air-gapped network, $49/month per instance, one-line installer, signed releases |
| AI incident analysis | ✓ New Relic AI assistant and anomaly detection | ✓ One-click root cause, fix and postmortem draft from the incident's evidence. 5 / 100 / 500 analyses a month |
| Small team: 3 servers, 50 monitors, 5 people | $10/month if one person needs the full platform and the rest use basic views; $406/month on Standard if all five need full access. Ingest for 3 servers usually stays within the free 100 GB | ✓ $10/month on Pro (5 servers, 100 monitors, 5 seats included) |
Small-team estimate uses public list prices and the cheapest tier that covers 3 servers, 50 monitors at 1-minute intervals and 5 people. Where a vendor meters by run, GB or hour we show the arithmetic so you can redo it with your own numbers.
What New Relic does well
- The free tier is genuinely useful: 100 GB/month covers a lot of logs and metrics, and one full user is free.
- Full APM with distributed tracing in every language, plus infrastructure, logs, browser and synthetic monitoring in one UI.
- Query language (NRQL) and dashboards are excellent.
Where Vigil is ahead
- Full-platform users are $99 each on Standard (max 5) and $349 each on Pro. A team of five who all need the full UI pays $406/month on Standard.
- 500 synthetic checks a month on free is a few hours of one-minute monitoring; beyond that it is metered.
- No customer-facing status pages.
- Complex enough that a small team spends real time on setup and cost management.
When to pick New Relic instead
Pick New Relic if one engineer can own it and stay on the free tier, if you need full APM and distributed tracing, or if 100 GB of free ingest covers your logs. It is a far deeper product than Vigil for application performance.
What Vigil does not do
- No browser / Playwright checks: Vigil scripts APIs, not clicks in a real browser.
- No SMS or phone-call alerting; alerts go to chat apps, push services, email, webhooks and ticketing tools.
- No on-call rotations or schedules: escalation policies and acknowledgements only.
- APM covers Python and Node apps on hosts running the agent; it is not a substitute for a full APM suite.
- Checks run from Vigil's servers plus private locations you host; there is no menu of dozens of public regions.
Moving from New Relic to Vigil
1. Export what you have
List your New Relic monitors (their API or UI export). You need a name, URL or host, interval and the expected status or keyword for each.
2. Apply as code
Write them as Vigil's YAML and apply with PUT /api/v1/config; the same endpoint exports everything back, so monitors can live in git. Or create them one by one through the REST API (monitors, incidents, maintenance, deploy markers).
3. Reconnect alerts
Add Telegram, Slack, Discord, Teams, ntfy, Pushover, email or webhook channels; set escalation to a second channel set. Point your cron jobs at the new heartbeat URLs and install the server agent with one command.
Run both side by side during the trial: Vigil's alert ingestion accepts Alertmanager and Grafana-style webhooks, so existing alerts can appear on a Vigil status page while you move over.
Frequently asked
Is New Relic free tier better than Vigil free?
For depth, yes: 100 GB of ingest and full APM for one user is a lot. Vigil's free plan is smaller (10 monitors, 1 server, 100k log lines) but includes a status page, Telegram/Slack/Discord alerts and five AI incident analyses, and Vigil Pro at $10 covers five people.
Does Vigil have distributed tracing?
Vigil records request traces and a service map for Python and Node apps on hosts running its agent. It does not trace across many services in other languages the way New Relic does.
How do I migrate synthetic checks to Vigil?
List your synthetic monitors, write them as Vigil YAML (URL, interval, expected status or JSON assertion) and apply with PUT /api/v1/config. Scripted browser checks have no equivalent in Vigil; rewrite them as API flows where possible.
Can I run Vigil alongside New Relic?
Yes. Many teams keep New Relic for APM and use Vigil for uptime, heartbeats, status pages and team alerting. Vigil can also create New Relic incidents from its alerts.
Ready to leave New Relic?
Start free: 10-day Pro trial, no card. Everything you set up stays on the Free plan when the trial ends.
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