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 8.0, while SolarWinds is ranked #22 with an average rating of 7.3. New Relic holds a 8.3% 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 157 New Relic reviews

19,153 Views
15,190 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

SolarWinds Server and Appli...

Read 40 SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor reviews

4,252 Views
2,822 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: December 2024).

Buyer's Guide

New Relic vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

December 2024

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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

157

Ranking in other categories

Network Monitoring Software (6th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (5th), IT Operations Analytics (2nd), Mobile APM (2nd), 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 (11th), Active Directory Management (14th)

Mindshare comparison

As of December 2024, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of New Relic is 8.3%, 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

"The most valuable feature is the ability to manage the application flow."

"The integration and configuration of New Relic is straightforward and easy."

"The pricing is pretty good."

"The feature I found most valuable is being able to design my queries. It's easy to design a query."

"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."

"It is stable and scalable."

"The solution is quite stable."

"We have done the New Relic integration with Serverless AWS, which has helped us with monitoring, and keeping our monitoring from our on-premise part with the cloud part."

More New Relic pros

"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."

"Identifying the problem statement is easy."

"AppInsight. Provides a simple way to get very in-depth monitoring configured for our most popular applications. Exchange, SQL, and SharePoint."

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

"Features like monitoring and infrastructure dependency mapping are valuable to us."

"I adore the NTA module that provides deep details on ingress/egress traffic for any interface. With a few clicks, you can correlate who is accessing what and when, beside the bandwidth consuming applications/users."

"SSL Certificate Monitoring and Expiry Alerting"

"The most valuable feature is application monitoring."

More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor pros

Cons

"Some of our customers see New Relic as a promising product to have, and we would like to deliver it to them. The only way we would be able to do that would be if we had server appliance for clients that we could install in their data centres."

"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."

"I would like if it could have predictive analysis. Today, we only have the option to configure thresholds."

"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."

"There has been some problem with the agent, and it is just not working well. It is not able to record information with the application server. They have been able to fix the issue, but it took quite a long time. This is the main issue in the APM products and also in New Relic. The mobile application monitoring has been pretty difficult to set up and also quite expensive. It should be a little bit easier and cheaper. Because it is pretty difficult and expensive, many customers don't take it."

"The price could improve."

"I think that there have been some questionable product enhancements. Over a year ago, New Relic rolled out a new navigation that really disrupted our workflow."

"The pricing could be improved as it is quite high relative to what is offered."

More New Relic cons

"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."

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

"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 product does not explain why a problem occurred."

"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."

"This product has no real downside unless they fail to continue development of its capabilities."

"SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor could improve the server monitoring and the web application monitoring features are not good. Microsoft SCOM has better server monitoring."

"Downside of the tools is the web console are hung or crash. It need to improve the performance."

More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"We're paying for the New Relic APM license annually."

"The pricing could be better. We did not purchase the full version. Maybe if we applied all the other features of the full version of New Relic, we could get all the features that we feel are missing."

"We feel it's a little bit pricey."

"The detection piece of it brings us a big return on investment."

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

"This solution required a license and it is better than some other competitors."

"The solution is priced reasonably. New Relic APM is one of the best products for me because it's economical, so anyone can easily pick it over other solutions and use it."

More New Relic pricing and cost advice

"The licenses start from USD 3000.00 and go up to USD 20,000.00 for the year. It's a perpetual license. Nothing is free in SolarWinds, anything that you need is an additional cost."

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

"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."

"The product might cost you $30,000 USD to buy, but scaling this solution requires the purchase of additional polling engines at $20,000 USD each."

"Understanding the counts of objects to monitor will determine the licensing need. In terms of pricing, it’s not cheap but it’s not expensive as larger vendors whose products don’t have all the features or integrations."

"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."

"I like the pricing for this SolarWinds product."

"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."

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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824,053 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

51%

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

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?

It helps prevent issues but does not cause losses. The error messages and deep insights may help us find the root cause and resolve the issue. It could be bit better. We are looking at sorting the ...

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

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 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 18% of the time

AppDynamics vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

Compared 14% of the time

Prometheus vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

Compared 7% of the time

Nagios XI 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

December 2024

Download New Relic product report

Buyer's Guide

SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

November 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

December 2024

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