Vigil vs New Relic
Updated · prices checked September 2026
New Relic is a serious APM and observability suite with a free tier that is honestly good for one engineer. The price problem is seats: every extra full-platform user is $99 to $349 a month. Vigil gives every team member the full product from $19/month total, with status pages and Telegram alerts New Relic lacks, but Vigil's APM is far shallower.
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: 20 monitors at 5-minute checks, 1 server, 1 status page, 3 team members, 7 days of history, Telegram/Slack/Discord alerts. Commercial use allowed. Free forever.
- Starter $19/month: 50 monitors at 1-minute intervals, 3 servers, 3 status pages, unlimited team members, 30 days of history.
- Pro $49/month: 200 monitors at 1-minute intervals, 15 servers, unlimited team members, 10 status pages with custom domain, password and white-label, 2,000,000 log lines, 5 Kubernetes clusters, RUM, 150 AI analyses, 90 days of history.
- Business $149/month: 1,000 monitors, 100 servers, unlimited team members, 10 identity providers (SSO, SAML, SCIM), 10 private locations, 1-year history.
- Every feature, including SSO, SLOs and private locations, is on every plan; the plans differ only in numbers.
- New accounts start on a 14-day Pro trial with no card, then stay on Free unless you choose a plan. Yearly billing gets 2 months free, no overage charges.
- Self-hosted $149/month per instance on your own server or air-gapped network.
- Add-ons on paid plans from $4: +50 monitors ($5), +5 servers ($5), +5 status pages ($4), +1M log lines ($4).
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 $49 Pro plan unless stated.
| Vigil | New Relic | |
|---|---|---|
| Uptime / API monitors and fastest interval | ✓ 20 Free (5-minute checks) / 50 Starter / 200 Pro / 1,000 Business. 1-minute checks on paid plans, 12 monitor types (Uptime, API check, API flow, Browser check, Heartbeat, TCP port, Domain & DNS, App health, Dependency, Content change, Price / number, Keyword) | ~ Synthetic checks: 500/month free, then metered. Ping, API, scripted browser |
| Servers (infrastructure agent) | ✓ 1 / 3 / 15 / 100 servers included. Single-file agent for Linux and macOS, PowerShell agent for Windows: CPU, memory, disks, network, processes, services, Docker, packages, vulnerabilities, disk forecasts | ✓ Infrastructure agent; cost comes through GB ingested |
| Logs | ✓ 10k / 250k / 2M / 10M lines included. File and journald shipping, full-text search, live tail, log-alert rules | ✓ Included in the 100 GB, then $0.40–0.60/GB |
| APM / traces | ~ Any OpenTelemetry SDK can send traces, metrics and logs over OTLP; Vigil's own lightweight SDKs cover Python and Node. Endpoints with p95 and Apdex, stored slow traces, slow queries, N+1 detection, service map. Not a full APM suite: no profiling | ✓ Full APM with distributed tracing, one of the best |
| Kubernetes | ✓ 1 cluster on Free and Starter, 5 on Pro, unlimited on Business. DaemonSet manifest; incidents for CrashLoopBackOff, OOMKilled, NotReady, pressure | ✓ Kubernetes integration and cluster explorer |
| Real User Monitoring | ✓ Web Vitals p75, page views, JS errors. 1 site Free, 2 sites / 100k views Starter, 10 sites / 1M views Pro, 50 sites / 10M views Business | ✓ Browser monitoring with Core Web Vitals and session traces |
| Status pages: private, custom domain, white-label | ✓ Private by default, password or private-link sharing, custom domain with automatic HTTPS and custom CSS on every plan including Free; white-label on paid plans. 1 / 3 / 10 / 50 pages | ✕ No customer-facing status pages |
| Team seats | ✓ 3 on Free, unlimited on every paid plan. Owner / admin / member / viewer roles | ~ 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 |
| Alert channels (incl. Telegram) | ✓ Telegram, Slack, Discord, Teams, Google Chat, Matrix, ntfy, Gotify, Pushover, webhooks (HMAC, templates), email, phone push. Tickets to PagerDuty, Opsgenie, Jira, ServiceNow, Zendesk (1 ticketing channel on Free, more on paid plans). No SMS or phone calls on the hosted service; the self-hosted edition pages by SMS and call through your own Twilio account | ✓ Slack, PagerDuty, email, webhooks, Teams; Telegram via webhook |
| Self-hosted option | ✓ Full product on your server or air-gapped network, $149/month per instance, one-line installer, signed releases | ✕ SaaS only |
| AI incident analysis | ✓ One-click root cause, fix and postmortem draft from the incident's evidence. 5 / 30 / 150 / 1,000 analyses a month | ✓ New Relic AI assistant and anomaly detection |
| Small team: 3 servers, 50 monitors, 5 people | ✓ $19/month on Starter (3 servers, 50 monitors, unlimited team members included) | $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 |
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
Limits of New Relic that Vigil does not have:
- 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
- Browser checks use a short line-by-line script run in headless Chromium (with screenshots), not full Playwright test code kept in git.
- No SMS or phone-call alerting on the hosted service (the self-hosted edition can page by SMS and call through your own Twilio account); hosted alerts go to chat apps, phone push, email, webhooks and ticketing tools.
- On-call is simple: rotations, overrides, escalation and acknowledgements, without the scheduling depth of PagerDuty or incident.io.
- Vigil's own APM SDKs are Python and Node; other languages send traces through any OpenTelemetry SDK over OTLP. There is no profiling, and 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 (20 monitors, 1 server, 10k log lines) but includes a status page, 3 team members, Telegram/Slack/Discord alerts and five AI incident analyses, and every paid Vigil plan, from Starter at $19, covers the whole team.
Does Vigil have distributed tracing?
Vigil accepts traces from any OpenTelemetry SDK over OTLP and has its own lightweight SDKs for Python and Node, with stored slow traces and a service map. Its trace analysis is much lighter than New Relic's, and there is no profiling.
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 become Vigil browser checks (a short line-by-line script in headless Chromium) or API flows.
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.
Try Vigil next to New Relic
Start free: every new account gets 14 days of Pro, no card. When the trial ends the account stays on Free (20 monitors) unless you choose a plan, and everything you set up stays.
All comparisons: Better Stack · UptimeRobot · Freshping · Uptime Kuma · Pingdom · StatusCake · Hyperping · Checkly · Atlassian Statuspage · Instatus · OpenStatus · Cronitor · Healthchecks.io · Sentry · GlitchTip · BugSnag · Rollbar · Honeybadger · PagerDuty · Opsgenie · Datadog · Grafana Cloud · AppSignal · Dynatrace