HeadSpin vs New Relic comparison

HeadSpin and New Relic are both solutions in the Mobile APM category. HeadSpin is ranked #7, while New Relic is ranked #3 with an average rating of 7.8. HeadSpin holds a 0.2% mindshare in MA, compared to New Relic’s 26.6% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of HeadSpin users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of New Relic users who would recommend it.

HeadSpin

Read 6 HeadSpin reviews

65 Views
33 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

New Relic

Read 158 New Relic reviews

3,989 Views
3,134 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

HeadSpin

New Relic

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Aug 13, 2024

New Relic and HeadSpin are tools in performance monitoring and optimization. New Relic is rated higher for its features and ease of deployment, while HeadSpin is noted for its ROI and pricing.

Features: New Relic offers monitoring and analytics capabilities, extensive integrations, and customizable dashboards. HeadSpin provides advanced mobile app testing, real-time data on performance issues, and a platform focused on mobile user experience.

Room for Improvement: New Relic could benefit from more intuitive navigation, reduced complexity in setup, and simplification of its feature set. HeadSpin needs better documentation, more responsive support, and refinement in usability to guide users effectively.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: New Relic is often remarked for its straightforward deployment and reliable customer service. HeadSpin has an efficient deployment process, but users desire faster customer service responses and more proactive support.

Pricing and ROI: New Relic, though higher in price, delivers good ROI due to its comprehensive features. HeadSpin is noted for competitive pricing and substantial ROI, particularly in mobile testing.

To learn more, read our detailed HeadSpin vs. New Relic Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

HeadSpin vs. New Relic

April 2025

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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

HeadSpin

Ranking in Mobile APM

7th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Functional Testing Tools (30th), Mobile App Testing Tools (11th)

New Relic

Ranking in Mobile APM

3rd

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

158

Ranking in other categories

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (5th), Network Monitoring Software (7th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (6th), IT Operations Analytics (3rd), Cloud Monitoring Software (4th), AIOps (3rd)

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Mobile APM category, the mindshare of HeadSpin is 0.2%, down from 0.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of New Relic is 26.6%, down from 28.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Mobile APM

Featured Reviews

Abhishek-Mehta

Associate Vice President at Onnivation

An advanced platform that provides visibility into the performance in the real world and enables us to test AV content

There is definitely room for improvement in terms of marketing. Marketing is something that is not that great. If you look at some of the other companies in the space, they have a lot of published case studies and tested models. They make a lot of noise. They have got some of their best customers talking about them, which is where HeadSpin needs to work. They should automate their onboarding. A lot of things are still manual. They can create a video assistant or something like that to completely automate the entire process. There is a great scope to improve professional services. The time to deploy is quite long. They can increase and improve the scope of their professional services and set up automation through scripts. They do it at this stage, but they're very expensive. I would love to see them come up with project-based costing for companies that are startups or low on funds. Apart from these, they have been on top of the game in terms of features. I can't think of any other new set of features at this point in time because they're already on top in terms of innovation.

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Iqbal Khowaja

Chief Technology Officer at State of Hawaii

Has a simple user interface and end-to-end monitoring and self-healing features

My organization uses many application performance management solutions, such as AppDynamics, New Relic APM, Splunk, and Datadog. I'm the CTO for the state of Hawaii, and across the board, different departments use different APM tools. I'm using the latest version of New Relic APM, but I cannot recall the exact version. My company has a dozen engineers using and monitoring New Relic APM. I'd tell anyone planning to use New Relic APM that it has to fit what you have. For example, most of my company's payload is in AWS, and the tool has adopters and features that CloudWatch cannot provide. Still, New Relic APM can, so you should do a demo or trial run first and see if it's a tool that'll help you with end-to-end monitoring. New Relic APM is working well for my company, so an excellent way to start is to do a trial run to see how the tool works out for your current applications. My rating for the tool is nine out of ten because my experience with it has been great. New Relic also worked closely with my company and has always been upfront on what's available and what's not. My company is a New Relic APM customer.

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"The technical support is really helpful because we can set up direct calls with them if we want to. We can use Zoom or Google Meet to interact with them directly, and if there is an issue in our system, they will help us by reproducing the issue in their machines and trying to figure out a solution. The support is really smooth, and we like that they're very supportive."

"The most valuable feature of HeadSpin it's the integration with other solutions. It is great. I can search for an element or do a quick debugging on the application right on HeadSpin. It's very useful."

"The initial setup of HeadSpin was very easy and user-friendly. It was easy to configure and write a script."

"It has an interesting feature called AV box testing. A lot of companies that are in the OTT segment don't really understand what their streaming is like. They can't test for streaming quality. There are restrictions where you cannot simulate live streaming. For example, on Netflix, you can't simulate how a movie is being streamed on a remote device. That's why HeadSpin has got this AV box testing feature. It is a patented feature. They send an AV box to your location, and you can test live streaming, which is something that no other company does."

"The most valuable feature is that this is the first connected intelligence all-in-one platform."

"The most valuable features of the product are the performance parameters it gives us."

"We were able to integrate with the messaging tool, Slack, which meant that we got notifications whenever something was not quite right."

"The most valuable feature is application monitoring."

"Using New Relic speeds up troubleshooting and resolution, giving us a clearer picture of where issues are, thus saving time and effort."

"We like the performance of the product."

"Server uptime is its most valuable feature."

"The alert mechanism is quite accurate when something goes wrong in your system. For example, if you have hundreds of APIs on your server, and any of the APIs is not performing well, you get an alert. When there is a drop or change in the threshold value, the beauty of New Relic is that within a fraction of seconds, all the stakeholders who are configured in the New Relic system will get an alert. That's one good thing."

"New Relic has helped us in terms of the optimizing our print and loading times."

"There are many valuable features in New Relic APM. We developed some software applications and we are able to monitor the errors very easily. Their log security retention is very good."

More New Relic pros

Cons

"HeadSpin needs to improve the hardware. With the mobile, the battery life reduces and must be continuously charged."

"They should automate their onboarding. A lot of things are still manual. They can create a video assistant or something like that to completely automate the entire process."

"Sometimes, devices go offline and some features are not functioning on some devices, specifically on iOS."

"Support and pricing could be improved."

"HeadSpin could improve on the user interface because it is very poor. The checks that are done on the iOS devices are very difficult, but for Android, it runs great. For all iOS devices, the user interface and how it interacts with the device are very poor."

"If you want to do some testing or check the devices manually or check the application in a particular device manually, it is really laggy. That's a disappointment because sometimes we would like to do manual testing when our local devices are not available."

"The connectivity between legacy and newer cloud applications is not great."

"I would like to have storage monitoring. E.g., being able to monitor SANS, specifically protocols, like NFS and CIFS metrics."

"The product's initial setup phase is not straightforward to manage if you have no experience with installations, making it an area that can be improved."

"The monitoring is only as good as the alerts that it produces. By having it set up fine grain alerting, it is a bit of a pain."

"New Relic APM is a good tool, and it has a database of failures, but it could use a list of customer-specific failures. New Relic APM should be able to give my company advanced analytics through AI."

"I haven't come across any features that are lacking."

"Documentation could be improved in New Relic APM, so users would have more clarity on configuring the dashboard. If New Relic gave better guidelines, users would find it easier to understand the metrics and features of New Relic APM. Another area for improvement is integration with Kubernetes. Currently, the process isn't user-friendly. It's challenging and lacks documentation for users to understand how to integrate New Relic APM with Kubernetes quickly. With multiple levels of Kubernetes dockers and other DBs on different clouds, it's tricky to gather all into New Relic APM on a single dashboard. What I'd like to see in the next version of New Relic APM is a single dashboard where you can easily view which applications fall under specific APMs. If there's a search feature where you can type in a keyword to find out if an APM is related to a particular application, that would be great."

"I would like a feature where I can turn off alerting at a policy level. Thus, when a policy is inactive, I can shut down all of my alerts within the policy."

More New Relic cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I believe the licensing cost is cheap because it's a total solution, hardware, license and software."

"It's not cheap, but there are a few different packages and different prices for enterprises with different product versions."

"We have a yearly license for 16 devices."

"It has a yearly license. There is no other option. It is expensive. There are a lot of other cheaper players in the market, but it is like a Mercedes. You pay an extra premium for it, but you get the benefits. I would love to see them come up with project-based costing. Companies that are low on funds or new-age can do with pricing that is easily digestible. They can give them a pricing model for three months. They can provide a startup package."

"I loved this product, but we can no longer afford it, so we dropped it."

"New Relic is either free with low retention and minimal functionalities, or expensive with full options and retention."

"It would be nice if we could buy it annually instead of monthly."

"If it’s the right tool, it doesn’t matter what it costs because you’re going to get it back many-fold from your productivity."

"The solution is quite expensive. It costs around $5,000 a month. There aren't any additional costs above that."

"The monthly cost os $1000 per server per month, but it could be even more. We pay about $250 for the server, and then New Relic wants over $1000 to give us statistics on those servers."

"There is a picture which goes to your browser and it monitors requests from other users. However, it's impossible to use now because the price is very high. The feature is very nice, but I tried it during the trial period, and the current price makes it impossible to use."

"The solution is cheap, but prices can go up when users grow."

More New Relic pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

16%

Computer Software Company

15%

Manufacturing Company

13%

Real Estate/Law Firm

Educational Organization

53%

Computer Software Company

Financial Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

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Any advice about APM solutions?

There are many factors and we know little about your requirements (size of org, technology stack, management systems, the scope of implementation). Our goal was to consolidate APM and infra monitor...

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What do you like most about New Relic Insights?

The product's initial setup phase was very easy.

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What needs improvement with New Relic Insights?

Email alert customization is limited; it cannot be tailored much, which makes the system more rigid than optimal. The handling of logs from integration tools is not as advanced compared to other to...

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Comparisons

Perfecto vs HeadSpin

Compared 60% of the time

BrowserStack vs HeadSpin

Compared 40% of the time

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Dynatrace vs New Relic

Compared 12% of the time

Elastic Observability vs New Relic

Compared 12% of the time

Datadog vs New Relic

Compared 9% of the time

Azure Monitor vs New Relic

Compared 5% of the time

Splunk AppDynamics vs New Relic

Compared 5% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

HeadSpin

April 2025

Download HeadSpin product report

Buyer's Guide

New Relic

March 2025

Download New Relic product report

Also Known As

No data available

New Relic Browser, New Relic Applied Intelligence, New Relic Insights, New Relic Synthetics, New Relic Servers, New Relic APM

Overview

Headspin is a data science-driven Mobile APM platform that leverages an AI platform to combine global device infrastructure, test automation, machine learning-driven performance, and quality of experience analytics. HeadSpin was founded to answer the demand for a global testing, performance monitoring, and quality of experience (QoE) management platform to assist businesses in ensuring optimal digital experiences across mobile, audio, online, and video delivery channels.

Headspin facilitates seamless collaboration between product managers, SREs, developers, QA/release engineers, and support staff to:

Quicken development times using intelligent automation in test and production.
Optimize digital performance across devices, networks, and apps.
Automate insights discovery with practical, context-aware AI and analytics.

Headspin Features

Headspin has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

Global device infrastructure allows end-to-end monitoring and testing with thousands of devices in numerous locations on real carrier and WiFi networks around the world. SDK is not required.
Test automation and APIs integrate into CI/CD workflows to enable functional and performance testing pre and post release. Support for all testing frameworks.
Performance, QoE, and machine learning automatically expose issues and points to underlying root causes across all layers of the stack, from quantifying audio/video quality of experience to code and packet visibility.
Insights-to-actions delivers regression and aggregation insights throughout the digital experience lifecycle. These insights take you from planning and development to troubleticketing and operations. Trending, alerts, and analytics.

More features include:

Hosted Device Cloud
On-prem Device Appliance
Performance & Experience Analytics
Professional Services & Support
Education, Certification & Training

Headspin Benefits

There are many benefits to implementing Headspin. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

Use data science to identify problems and root cause analysis

Empower QA and DevOps teams with data science insights and test automation

Global teams can work together using remote access

Capture performance and UX issues

Reviews from Real Users

Headspin stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Some of these include its easy setup, scalability, and robust customer support. PeerSpot users take note of the advantages of these features in their reviews:

Abhishek M., Associate Vice President at Onnivation, notes, “A lot of companies that are using other solutions do not get access to the kind of metrics that HeadSpin captures…HeadSpin is highly advanced. It has got all the performance structures to provide visibility into how my app is performing in the real world. It also helps to identify the gaps.”

Shiba S., Automation Engineer at GlobalLogic India, writes, “The technical support is really helpful because we can set up direct calls with them if we want to…They support multiple devices. Plus, they support distribution testing.”

HeadSpin

New Relic is a powerful tool for optimizing web pages, tracking user behavior, and monitoring application performance. It helps detect anomalies, generate metrics, and create dashboards for synthetics monitoring, container workloads, stress tests, and more.

New Relic provides organizations with comprehensive insights into APIs, infrastructure, and scalability. It supports mobile and web applications with features like java tracking, health maps, customizable dashboards, and drill-downs. Users benefit from its easy initial setup, accurate alerts, UI monitoring, error tracking, and traceability. New Relic supports multiple ecosystems with straightforward pricing and new feature introductions, offering end-to-end monitoring, thorough data analysis, and effective problem resolution.

What are New Relic's most important features?

Java Tracking: Efficiently monitor Java applications.
Infrastructure Monitoring: Comprehensive overview of infrastructure health.
APM: In-depth application performance monitoring.
Tight Integration: Seamless integration across different system layers.
Health Maps: Visual representation of system health.
Customizable Dashboards: Personalized data display and insights.
Drill-Downs: Detailed analysis at multiple levels.

What benefits and ROI should users look for in reviews?

Application Insights: Detailed understanding of application performance.
Accurate Alerts: Immediate notifications for issues.
Traceability: Enhanced end-to-end traceability for problem resolution.
Scalability: Accommodation of growing infrastructure.
Flexible Query Design: Adaptable search and analysis functionality.
Reliable Performance: Consistent application monitoring and upkeep.

New Relic is leveraged in industries such as e-commerce, finance, and technology. It helps monitor web traffic, evaluate load balancing, and ensure applications meet performance standards. Companies use it for stress tests, container-based workloads, API monitoring, and infrastructure management. Its integration capabilities are valuable for maintaining performance and scalability across diverse ecosystems, aiding in thorough data analysis and problem resolution.

New Relic

Sample Customers

Zynga, Tinder, Pinterest, Akamai, Microsoft, Airbnb, Jam City, TMobile, Mozilla, CNN, Cognizant, Yahoo!, ebay, Quora, Walmart, Kohls, Telstra

World Fuel Services, Verizon, FootLocker, McDonald's, Trainline, Mondia Media, Confused, Costa Coffee, Ryanair, Marks & Spencer, William Hill, Delivery Hero, Skyscanner, BASF, DAZN, Veygo, Virtuo, movingimage, talabat, Australia Post, Tokopedia, Seven Network, Virgin Australia, Zomato, BigBasket, Mercado Libre, Lending Club

Buyer's Guide

HeadSpin vs. New Relic

April 2025

Free Report: HeadSpin vs. New Relic

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