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 #16 with an average rating of 7.3. New Relic holds a 6.6% mindshare in APM, compared to SolarWinds’s 1.7% 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

16,752 Views
13,067 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

SolarWinds Server and Appli...

Read 42 SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor reviews

3,793 Views
2,563 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: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

New Relic vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

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

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 (4th), AIOps (3rd)

SolarWinds Server and Appli...

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

16th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

5.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Server Monitoring (9th), Active Directory Management (12th)

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of New Relic is 6.6%, down from 9.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is 1.7%, up from 1.6% 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.

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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 simplicity of the dashboard is very good."

"As soon as it monitors all our systems and is integrated with PagerDuty, the operations team just needs to wait for alerts on their cellphones to fix things."

"The most valuable feature is application monitoring."

"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."

"The versatility of the solution is its most valuable feature."

"We detect issues using dashboards that we built on New Relic."

"The best feature of New Relic is its simple look and feel, making it easier to use than other tools."

"The most valuable feature is the New Relic APM module to deep-dive into the application, to get bottlenecks to the surface, and to improve application performance. Also, the New Relic Insights module creates a real-time dashboard on application performance to create awareness for the DevOps team."

More New Relic pros

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

"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."

"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."

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

"It is simple to implement and can provide fairly decent Windows-based monitoring, beyond simple SNMP. It is great for monitoring newbies and smaller shops."

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

"SolarWinds SAM has significantly improved our workflow by allowing us to develop a comprehensive knowledge base of known errors and automate responses to specific alerts."

"Identifying the problem statement is easy."

More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor pros

Cons

"There are times when you restart the engines and the servers have a unique ID for the host and you need to remove the server. It is difficult because some are on-premise and others are production hosts. Having downtime is not very good when updating. However, it is not a constant issue."

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

"They need to improve the alerting and dashboarding as these are the key features in DevOps."

"It gives you amazing statistics, but doesn’t give you enough information about what to do with the statistics."

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

"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."

"One thing I'd like to see in any APM, especially New Relic, is the ability to use distributed transactions. When one microservice calls another, it calls another database and microservice. The entire data visualization layer will not be able to correlate from one microservice from end to end and return on that path. Distributed transactions would be a great addition that would make life simpler. Unfortunately, no APM has that end-to-end capability."

"One of the things that our enterprise actually had a challenge with was the licensing structure for New Relic."

More New Relic cons

"SAM AppInsight for SQL: The ability to ignore fragmentation of specific indexes."

"The stability, flexibility, and ease of use could be improved."

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

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

"It would be helpful if the solution could integrate more with the security compliances, like this IDSS, etc."

"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."

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

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

More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price was one of the reasons we chose this solution."

"This is an expensive product."

"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 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 price of New Relic could improve. It is expensive."

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

"Comparatively, the pricing is expensive."

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

More New Relic pricing and cost advice

"The tool is available for my company at a good price point."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"I would rate the pricing for this solution a three out of five."

"The product is expensive."

"I have always said SolarWinds is very “proud” of their products, meaning they are expensive. I cannot afford to purchase all the licenses I need for all the SolarWinds products."

More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

53%

Computer Software Company

Financial Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

Educational Organization

41%

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?

There are no specific features or functionality I would like to see improved or enhanced in SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor at this time. I have not encountered any missing features or fu...

See all answers

Comparisons

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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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Azure Monitor vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

Compared 18% of the time

Dynatrace vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

Compared 18% of the time

Splunk AppDynamics vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

Compared 12% of the time

Prometheus Group vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

Compared 8% 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

April 2025

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