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 #3 with an average rating of 7.8, while SolarWinds is ranked #22 with an average rating of 7.1. New Relic holds a 8.1% mindshare in APM, compared to SolarWinds’s 1.9% mindshare. Additionally, 94% of New Relic users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 88% of SolarWinds users who would recommend it.

New Relic

Read 158 New Relic reviews

18,442 Views
14,557 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

SolarWinds Server and Appli...

Read 40 SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor reviews

4,128 Views
2,761 Comparison Views

88% 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: January 2025).

Buyer's Guide

New Relic vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

January 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

3rd

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

158

Ranking in other categories

Network Monitoring Software (7th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (5th), IT Operations Analytics (2nd), Mobile APM (3rd), Cloud Monitoring Software (4th), AIOps (3rd)

SolarWinds Server and Appli...

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

22nd

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

5.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

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

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of New Relic is 8.1%, down from 10.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is 1.9%, 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

"New features are added often."

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

"It has helped my organization to dive deeper into the application using the APM module is very helpful."

"To me, the most valuable feature of New Relic APM is the traceability, mainly based on the time travel method, so you get the overall response time, which is pretty helpful for developers and ADR techs looking into issues on a deeper level. New Relic APM is a very good, tailor-made solution."

"It offers helpful user metrics so we can learn more about the user experience."

"We are able to drill down and see what is going on in the system."

"As New Relic is already integrated with Drupal, we can get our projects done with best practice and with the best value that we believe in."

"The most valuable features are infrastructure monitoring and application performance monitoring (APM)."

More New Relic pros

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

"The more valuable feature of this solution is the Exchange feature."

"Identifying the problem statement is easy."

"The most valuable feature of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is the network devices' performance monitor is the best."

"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."

"SolarWinds is a very stable platform compared to others on the market."

"Extremely user friendly: Any IT professional can learn how to admin NPM in a short time."

"The most valuable feature is application monitoring."

More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor pros

Cons

"It would help customers if there were an on-premises version available."

"It is very difficult to award the service level cycles at an endpoint level."

"The browser isn't exactly reliable."

"Email alert customization is limited."

"I would like to see the company implement the AI auto-baseline feature which Dynatrace has."

"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."

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

"It is complicated, especially in how you interpret the data that it provides. If it had a bit more canned, out-of-the-box features, especially some of the reporting features, that would be more useful."

More New Relic cons

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

"A lot of times, we have to do a lot of manual cleanups."

"The tool's AppStack needs to improve in the storage monitoring part. It should also include an analytics and recommendation approach. If I have found a fault in a server or application, I would like to know what caused it and how do I recover from it."

"The setup was complex. We had local support to assist us."

"Some custom applications cannot be monitored, and a lot more applications need to be included."

"Nodes in Azure are able to be monitored with the use of agents, but this does not apply to cloud service offerings that are not node based."

"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."

"I would like to see support for non-Windows or non-Microsoft domains, especially Apache and other non-Windows servers."

More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I think the pricing is reasonable."

"We spend somewhere around $5,000 to $6,000 per month with an annual recommitment of maybe $60,000. These are just ballpark figures."

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

"The price of New Relic APM could be less expensive. We are using the New Relic APM pro account and it is more costly. When compared to competitors the solution's pricing should be much more realistic."

"The pricing is okay comparatively their competitors. The only concern was whether it should be purchased on demand or bring your own license, and which way passes some savings onto the end customers."

"The pricing and licensing are too high."

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

"Pricing is better with New Relic APM than Dynatrace."

More New Relic pricing and cost advice

"I like the pricing for this SolarWinds product."

"The solution is overpriced in terms of application management."

"Its licensing is on a yearly basis. It is just the standard price, but it can vary depending on the current rate of the dollar."

"We pay around $ 2,000 to $ 5,000 yearly for the solution."

"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."

"Pricing is inexpensive, starting at 2440 euros. For that, you get the ability to monitor a couple of nodes and one year of maintenance and support."

"The product is expensive."

More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability solutions are best for your needs.

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

54%

Computer Software Company

Financial Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

Educational Organization

46%

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 product is expensive.

See all answers

What needs improvement with SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor?

One product area that could benefit from improvement is the synchronization of licensing periods across different modules. The misalignment of licensing terms can present commercial challenges when...

See all answers

Comparisons

Elastic Observability vs New Relic

Compared 12% of the time

Dynatrace vs New Relic

Compared 12% of the time

Datadog vs New Relic

Compared 9% of the time

Grafana vs New Relic

Compared 7% of the time

Sentry vs New Relic

Compared 5% of the time

More New Relic Competitors

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

AppDynamics vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

Compared 13% of the time

Prometheus vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

Compared 7% of the time

Nagios XI vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

Compared 4% of the time

More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

New Relic

January 2025

Download New Relic product report

Buyer's Guide

SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

December 2024

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

Learn More

New Relic

SolarWinds

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.

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.

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

January 2025

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