New Relic vs PagerDuty: Which One Does Your Team Actually Need?

New Relic and PagerDuty solve different problems — observability vs incident response — but teams often confuse which one to buy first. Here's the real pricing, feature breakdown, and how they fit together.

Updated 2026-09 · 2026

New Relic

Full-stack observability platform for monitoring apps, infrastructure, and logs

Free tier, then $99/user/mo (Standard)user/month + data usage

Strengths

+100GB/month of free data ingest, permanently free (not a trial)
+Deep APM, infrastructure, logs, and browser/mobile monitoring in one place
+Powerful NRQL query language for custom dashboards

Weaknesses

-Data ingest overage costs can spike unpredictably ($0.35-0.50/GB after free tier)
-No built-in on-call scheduling, escalation policies, or paging
-Learning curve for NRQL and dashboard setup

Best for

Engineering teams that need to see what's actually broken across their stack, not just get paged about it

PagerDuty

Incident response and on-call scheduling platform

Free (up to 5 users), then $21/user/mo (Professional)user/month

Strengths

+Purpose-built on-call scheduling, escalation policies, and rotations
+Reliable multi-channel alerting (phone, SMS, push, Slack)
+Free tier genuinely usable for small teams up to 5 people

Weaknesses

-Not a monitoring tool — it needs New Relic, Datadog, or similar feeding it alerts
-Business tier ($41/user/mo) needed for advanced automation and reporting
-Per-user pricing gets expensive once you're past 10-15 people

Best for

Teams that already have monitoring in place and need reliable on-call paging and incident coordination

Feature Comparison

Feature	New Relic	PagerDuty
Free tier	100GB/mo data ingest, unlimited basic users	Up to 5 users, core incident features
Core purpose	Observability & monitoring (APM, infra, logs)	Incident response & on-call management
On-call scheduling	❌ Not supported	✅ Full rotation & escalation policies
APM / infrastructure monitoring	✅ Native, deep tracing	❌ Relies on integrations
Custom dashboards & querying	✅ NRQL-based dashboards	⚠️ Basic status dashboards only
Alert routing (SMS/phone/push)	⚠️ Basic email/webhook alerts	✅ Multi-channel with reliability guarantees
Integrations with each other	✅ Sends alerts to PagerDuty	✅ Native New Relic integration
Log management	✅ Built-in log ingestion & search	❌ Not supported
Postmortem / incident timeline tools	❌ Not supported	✅ Built-in postmortem workflows
Pricing model	Per-user + data volume (usage-based)	Per-user (flat, predictable)
Best for team size	Any size, cost scales with data volume	Free up to 5, scales per seat after

The Verdict

These aren't really competitors — New Relic tells you something is broken, PagerDuty wakes someone up to fix it. Small teams usually start with New Relic's free tier for visibility and only add PagerDuty once they have real on-call responsibilities. If you're forced to pick one, go with New Relic first; you can't page someone about a problem you can't see.

How to switch from New Relic to PagerDuty

Full New Relic export guide →

1In New Relic, go to Alerts & AI, and for any historical incident data you want to keep, run NRQL queries in Query Builder and export results as CSV, or use the NerdGraph API to pull alert history programmatically
2Sign up for PagerDuty and create your services (e.g., 'Production API', 'Database') that will represent the systems you're monitoring
3In New Relic, navigate to Alerts & AI > Destinations, add PagerDuty as a notification channel, and paste in the integration key generated from your PagerDuty service
4Recreate your on-call rotations and escalation policies in PagerDuty manually — New Relic has no native equivalent to export, so this is built from scratch
5Test the integration by triggering a test alert condition in New Relic and confirming it creates an incident in PagerDuty with correct routing
6Migrate your team by adding them as PagerDuty users, assigning them to schedules, and communicating the new escalation flow before decommissioning any old alerting channels

New Relic vs PagerDuty: common questions

How do I export data from New Relic before switching tools?+

New Relic doesn't require you to 'leave' when adding PagerDuty — they're meant to work together via the New Relic-PagerDuty integration in the New Relic Alerts UI. If you're exporting historical data for backup, use NRQL queries via the Query Builder and export results as CSV, or pull data programmatically through the NerdGraph GraphQL API.

What do we lose if we drop New Relic and only use PagerDuty?+

You lose all observability: APM traces, infrastructure metrics, log search, and root-cause dashboards. PagerDuty has no native monitoring — it only manages who gets notified and how incidents are tracked. You'd need another monitoring tool (Datadog, Grafana, etc.) feeding alerts into PagerDuty.

Is PagerDuty's free plan enough for a small team?+

Yes, if you're 5 or fewer users and just need basic on-call scheduling and alerting. You lose advanced escalation policies, event orchestration, and reporting, which are on the Professional ($21/user/mo) and Business ($41/user/mo) plans. Most teams outgrow the free tier once they need multiple escalation layers or integrations beyond the basics.

Does PagerDuty integrate with New Relic out of the box?+

Yes — New Relic has a native PagerDuty integration you can set up from Alerts & AI > Destinations in New Relic. It sends alert conditions directly to PagerDuty services, which then handles routing, escalation, and notification. Setup takes about 10-15 minutes and doesn't require custom webhooks for the basic flow.

What does this actually cost over a year for a 10-person team?+

New Relic Standard at $99/user/mo for 10 users is roughly $11,880/year before data overage charges, though many teams only need 1-2 full platform users plus free basic users, bringing it closer to $2,000-$4,000/year. PagerDuty Professional at $21/user/mo for 10 users runs about $2,520/year. Combined, expect $4,500-$14,000/year depending on how many full New Relic seats you actually need.