New Relic vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor comparison

New Relic and SolarWinds are both solutions in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category. New Relic is ranked #5 with an average rating of 7.8, while SolarWinds is ranked #18 with an average rating of 7.1. New Relic holds a 7.0% mindshare in APM, compared to SolarWinds’s 1.6% mindshare. Additionally, 94% of New Relic users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 89% of SolarWinds users who would recommend it.

New Relic

Read 158 New Relic reviews

17,416 Views
13,634 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

SolarWinds Server and Appli...

Read 42 SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor reviews

3,933 Views
2,633 Comparison Views

89% willing to recommend

New Relic

SolarWinds Server and Appli...

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 24, 2024

SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor and New Relic are popular monitoring tools with distinct benefits. SolarWinds is often highlighted for its easier setup and better value for initial setup costs, while New Relic is noted for its advanced features but with a higher learning curve.

Features: SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor offers robust infrastructure monitoring, comprehensive alerting capabilities, and user-friendly dashboards. New Relic provides advanced application performance monitoring, detailed transaction analysis, and extensive integrations. Users find New Relic's feature set more innovative.

Room for Improvement: SolarWinds users indicate a need for a more intuitive configuration process, better documentation, and enhanced scalability. New Relic users desire more flexible customization options, improved data accuracy, and a simpler user interface. SolarWinds is seen as easier to set up, while New Relic offers greater customization once mastered.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is frequently noted for its straightforward deployment process and responsive customer service. New Relic, although more complex to deploy, provides comprehensive support that users find valuable once they navigate the initial setup. SolarWinds's ease of deployment is an advantage, but New Relic’s robust support balances the comparison.

Pricing and ROI: Users generally find SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor to offer better value for initial setup costs and a quicker ROI. New Relic’s pricing is seen as premium, justified by its advanced features and depth of monitoring capabilities. Despite higher costs, New Relic’s extensive features are considered worth the investment.

To learn more, read our detailed New Relic vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor Report (Updated: March 2025).

Buyer's Guide

New Relic vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

March 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

New Relic

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

5th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

158

Ranking in other categories

Network Monitoring Software (7th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (6th), IT Operations Analytics (3rd), Mobile APM (3rd), Cloud Monitoring Software (5th), AIOps (3rd)

SolarWinds Server and Appli...

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

18th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

5.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Server Monitoring (10th), Active Directory Management (14th)

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of New Relic is 7.0%, down from 9.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is 1.6%, up from 1.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

Featured Reviews

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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Subhajit Nag

Senior Process Associate at Tata Consultancy Services

The component and cable monitoring features are good, but the interface is slow

SolarWinds' interface is slow, and this is a global concern. Every SolarWinds user complains about the sluggishness. The response is slow. If you browse from one page to another, you have to wait. Our company is a massive user with plenty of licenses, so the performance issues could be due to the load per license. Ten thousand components can be mapped under one license. So SolarWinds needs to take care of the speed problem. It cannot be this slow. That is a huge complaint. Otherwise, the tool is good. It should also be easier to upgrade SolarWinds. AppDynamics is harder to deploy but easier to upgrade. So AppDynamics takes a lot of time and effort to install, but you can upgrade it in minutes. SolarWinds is the opposite. It's easy to deploy, but upgrades take forever. To date, nobody can complete it on time, so the production environment is sitting idle. The upgrade time matters because you only install the solution once, but you'll need to upgrade the solution repeatedly over the life of the product. A complex installation isn't an issue, but I mind if the upgrade takes too long because it's already in production.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The synthetic alert is the most valuable feature in New Relic APM. I also like the time travel feature and find traceability useful in the solution. New Relic APM also has good response 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."

"They instrument up from the bottom to the top – every piece of code - they have a very perfect read of what’s being done, and how long it’s taking."

"It gives insights to non-technical people about what technical issues are most important, how much it impacts customers, and potentially, where we should be targeting our development teams when they have time."

"The solution is scalable, and it is easy because all the documentation is available."

"It is a one stop shop and integrated with PagerDuty seamlessly. The solution is pretty self-contained."

"It has the ability to monitor random URLs not tied to the one pinger per application (though it costs extra)."

"The APM feature is highly valuable as it can record session hosts, usage, and diagnose customer behaviors."

More New Relic pros

"The solution has good alerts. Notifications are sent via email to technicians. You can filter the kinds of alerts you want to receive as well. It's excellent."

"Monitoring of processes and services is the most valuable feature. It is not necessarily just the server alone in terms of the CPU or the memory. We can go in-depth into services and processes."

"It's good at monitoring system-specific things like ports, services."

"AppInsight for SQL: Enables us to see the relevant error log entries on the same page as performance parameters."

"The most beneficial aspect of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is its ability to monitor at the application level."

"The most valuable feature of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is its powerful monitoring capabilities."

"The product integrates with Remedy."

"The application dependency feature identifies issues between applications and servers or within the network where the application is hosted. It highlights related problems, whether related to packet processing or other issues, enabling the creation of alerts and reports accordingly."

More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor pros

Cons

"How granular I could go down at looking at certain data, especially related to the operations, is limited."

"I would like the ability to set up certain dummy accounts and do the actual things that the customer is doing, without impacting the production environment."

"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."

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

"In addition, its difficult to have a predictive tool to see how the application would behave in the future when it basically only shows the historical data."

"New Relic APM could improve error debugging and the correlation with the logs. We are receiving some alerts or alarms but we need to correlate with the error log, but it is difficult if it is more than seven months retention period, it is hard to trace. We need this especially for getting historical information."

"New Relic is very slow, and the app is a bit frustrating to use, which is something that has been happening a lot in the past year. During the last six months, I have noticed that it has become extremely laggy."

"The customization of the start and end time is kind of cool."

More New Relic cons

"The tool’s report feature created issues for us. We needed to gain skills to use that feature. The tool’s customization is not easy since you have to reconfigure the whole system."

"The technical support was better in previous years. With the launch of the premium support service, the normal support has declined."

"One product area that could benefit from improvement is the synchronization of licensing periods across different modules"

"There is one feature that is a report writer. And they are currently trying to take it out from being a stand-alone application and integrating to the web. This doesn't give us the flexibility and it doesn't expand what we can get when it comes to reporting. So, putting it on the web is going to make it difficult to get some information. Leaving it where it is now will help us a lot."

"SAM's software-defined network monitoring capability is also low and could be improved."

"In terms of the dashboards on offer, they should work to improve them. The types of dashboards that you get in terms of the graphs on offer aren't ideal right now."

"An additional feature that would improve this solution is the ability to complete root cause analysis."

"When you implement SolarWinds on a larger scale my customers complain about the speed."

More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We deploy everything on AWS. Purchasing the product on AWS Marketplace made it easier for us."

"Because of budget, we are not using the mobile app part of this tool."

"The product is neither cheap nor expensive, and I believe that it is a competitively-priced tool."

"The pricing model is a little confusing for beginners. They find it a little expensive, and if you are using it already, then that is not good."

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

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

"This is an expensive tool."

"The pricing and licensing are too high."

More New Relic pricing and cost advice

"Pricing and licensing is fair for what you get. It does have a great bang-for-the-buck appeal."

"Price can always be lower. It is neither on the expensive side nor on the cheap side. We have worked with them for a lot of years, so we get a discount due to the size of the installation."

"When planning for the number of licenses to purchase, make sure you understand all of the elements within an application required to really understand performance well. In our case, we quickly came to the conclusion that an unlimited license for SAM was the way to go."

"Nagios XI, WhatsUpGold, Uptime Software, PRTG, Manage Engine, and SpiceWorks are the other tools that have lower pricing and licensing costs. However, they can't compete with SolarWinds when it comes to the features and functionality that SolarWinds can provide."

"The solution's price is reasonable. Though it's on the higher side, the tool is worth the money."

"I think SolarWinds' pricing is very decent compared to other competitors in the market."

"We are on an annual license to use the solution. The price of the solution is expensive. The price is based on a bunch of factors, such as the number of engines and elements."

"SAM is not per server so the pricing model can be deceiving. If you have an enterprise environment, you will quickly exceed your licensing quickly. You should know this before going in."

More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

54%

Computer Software Company

Financial Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

Educational Organization

45%

Computer Software Company

Financial Services Firm

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

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...

See all answers

What do you like most about New Relic Insights?

The product's initial setup phase was very easy.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

What do you like most about SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor?

Identifying the problem statement is easy.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor?

The initial cost is quite high, but the renewal cost is reasonable.

See all answers

What needs improvement with SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor?

Application-based monitoring, such as monitoring within servers like Apache and IIS, has room for improvement. Monitoring these services is more complex compared to others.

See all answers

Comparisons

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

Grafana vs New Relic

Compared 6% of the time

Azure Monitor vs New Relic

Compared 5% of the time

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Azure Monitor vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

Compared 19% of the time

Dynatrace vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

Compared 19% of the time

Splunk AppDynamics vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

Compared 13% of the time

Prometheus Group vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

Compared 7% of the time

Zabbix vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

Compared 5% of the time

More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

New Relic

March 2025

Download New Relic product report

Buyer's Guide

SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

March 2025

SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor report

Download SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor product report

Also Known As

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

SolarWinds SAM

Overview

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

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM) delivers powerful application and server monitoring capabilities for IT pros, enabling them to diagnose and troubleshoot performance issues faster. Do not let slow applications and downtime impact your end-users and business services. Pinpoint the root cause of application issues across various layers of the IT stack. SolarWinds SAM is affordable and easy to deploy, use, and customize. You can automatically discover your system's environment and start monitoring in about an hour. No professional services or consultation needed.

SolarWinds

Sample Customers

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

Andr. L. Riis AS, NetSuite

Buyer's Guide

New Relic vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

March 2025

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