Not a Replacement -- a Complement
This is not a typical "us vs them" comparison. New Relic and Alert24 solve fundamentally different problems. Replacing New Relic with Alert24 would make no sense -- they operate in different layers of your stack.
New Relic is a full observability platform: APM, distributed tracing, log management, infrastructure monitoring, browser monitoring, synthetic monitoring, AIOps, and more. Its generous free tier (100 GB/month of data ingest) and powerful NRQL query language make it one of the most accessible and capable observability tools available.
Alert24 is an incident management and communication platform: on-call scheduling, escalation policies, multi-channel alerting, auto-updating status pages, and third-party dependency monitoring. It does not do APM. It does not collect traces. It does not manage logs. It does not monitor infrastructure.
The real question is not "Alert24 or New Relic?" It is "should I pay New Relic's prices for incident management workflows, or use a dedicated, cheaper tool for that layer?"
This post makes the case that for most teams, the answer is: keep New Relic for observability, use Alert24 for incident management and status pages.
The New Relic Pricing Model
New Relic restructured its pricing around data ingest and user seats. The free tier is generous, but costs scale quickly once you exceed it:
| New Relic Component | Price |
|---|---|
| Data ingest (free tier) | 100 GB/month included |
| Data ingest (beyond free tier) | $0.35-$0.55/GB |
| Full Platform user | $49-$549/user/month (depending on edition) |
| Core user | $49-$349/user/month |
| Basic user | Free |
| Alerts & Applied Intelligence | Included (basic), advanced AIOps in higher tiers |
| Incident Intelligence | Included in Pro/Enterprise editions |
| Synthetics | Included (with limits per edition) |
A 10-person engineering team on the Pro edition, ingesting 500 GB/month of data, can easily spend $3,000-6,000/month on New Relic. The platform is worth it for the observability capabilities, but the incident management workflow built into New Relic -- while functional -- is not its strongest feature.
New Relic's alerting and incident response capabilities are designed around its own data. They work well for detecting anomalies and routing notifications, but they do not include public status pages, third-party dependency monitoring, or the kind of dedicated incident lifecycle management that teams running customer-facing services need.
Alert24 Pricing for Comparison
Alert24 uses unit-based pricing. Each unit costs $18/month and includes 15 monitoring checks, a status page, and a team member. A free tier is available with 5 monitors and 1 team member.
| Team Size | Alert24 Monthly Cost | What You Get |
|---|---|---|
| 1 person | $18/mo | On-call, status page, 15 monitors, dependency monitoring |
| 5 people | $90/mo | 5 status pages, 75 monitors, full incident management |
| 10 people | $180/mo | 10 status pages, 150 monitors, post-incident reviews |
| 25 people | $450/mo | 25 status pages, 375 monitors, full platform |
For the incident management and status page layer specifically, Alert24 is dramatically cheaper than cobbling together equivalent capabilities through New Relic add-ons and third-party tools.
Feature Comparison: Incident Management Layer
This comparison focuses specifically on incident management, on-call, and status page capabilities -- the overlap between the two tools.
| Feature | Alert24 | New Relic |
|---|---|---|
| On-call scheduling | Rotations, overrides, vacation coverage | Basic notification routing (no dedicated on-call scheduling) |
| Escalation policies | Multi-tier with configurable timeouts | Alert policies with notification channels |
| Multi-channel alerting | Email, SMS, voice, Slack/Teams/Google Chat (notifications + acknowledge/resolve) | Email, Slack, PagerDuty/OpsGenie integration, webhooks, native mobile app |
| Uptime monitoring | Built-in: HTTP, DNS, SSL, TCP checks | Synthetic monitoring (included, with edition limits) |
| Third-party dependency monitoring | 2,000+ services tracked with AI-powered parsing | Not available |
| Public status pages | Built-in, auto-updating from monitoring data | Not available -- requires third-party tool |
| Auto-updating status pages | Yes -- monitoring triggers automatic status updates | Not available |
| Incident management | Full lifecycle with severity levels (P1-P4) | Incident Intelligence (correlation and grouping, Pro/Enterprise) |
| Post-incident reviews | Built-in with action items and metrics | Not a dedicated feature (use dashboards and queries) |
| SLA tracking | Built-in with breach alerts | Service levels with SLI/SLO tracking (strong feature) |
| APM / distributed tracing | Not available | Industry-leading with full-stack visibility |
| Log management | Not available | Comprehensive log analytics with NRQL |
| Infrastructure monitoring | Not available (HTTP/DNS/SSL/TCP checks only) | Full infrastructure monitoring (agents, Kubernetes, serverless) |
| Browser monitoring / RUM | Not available | Full real user monitoring with session traces |
| AIOps | Not available | Anomaly detection, incident correlation, noise reduction |
| Native mobile app | Not available | Full-featured mobile app for monitoring on the go |
| Query language | Not available | NRQL -- powerful, SQL-like query language for all telemetry data |
| Pricing model | $18/unit/month (flat, usage-based) | Data ingest + per-user seat pricing |
Where New Relic Wins (And It Is Not Close)
Full-stack observability. New Relic's APM, distributed tracing, infrastructure monitoring, log management, and browser monitoring give you complete visibility into your application stack. If you need to trace a slow API request through 12 microservices, correlate it with database query performance, and cross-reference it with browser load times -- New Relic does that. Alert24 does not attempt to.
NRQL query language. New Relic's SQL-like query language lets you ask arbitrary questions of your telemetry data. Need to know the 95th percentile latency of a specific endpoint, grouped by deployment version, for the last 48 hours? One NRQL query. This kind of ad-hoc analysis is fundamental to debugging production issues and is something Alert24 simply does not offer.
Generous free tier. New Relic gives you 100 GB/month of data ingest for free, with one full platform user. For small teams and side projects, this is enough to get meaningful observability at no cost. Few competitors match this level of free access.
AIOps and Incident Intelligence. New Relic's Applied Intelligence uses machine learning to correlate related incidents, reduce alert noise, and surface root causes. It groups related alerts automatically and suggests correlations that would take humans much longer to identify. Alert24's alerting is straightforward threshold and availability checking -- effective for uptime monitoring, but not comparable to New Relic's intelligence layer.
Native mobile app. New Relic offers a full-featured mobile app that lets you monitor dashboards, view alerts, and investigate issues from your phone. Alert24 does not have a native mobile app -- notifications come through SMS, voice calls, and messaging integrations.
Massive ecosystem. New Relic has 700+ integrations, a large open-source agent ecosystem, and deep instrumentation for virtually every language, framework, and cloud service. OpenTelemetry support means you are not locked into proprietary agents.
Service levels and SLOs. New Relic's service level management is excellent -- you define SLIs and SLOs against any telemetry data, track error budgets, and get alerts when you are burning through your budget too quickly. This is a strong native feature.
Where Alert24 Wins
Dedicated incident management at a fraction of the cost. Alert24's entire platform -- on-call scheduling, escalation policies, multi-channel alerting, monitoring, and status pages -- costs $180/month for a 10-person team. New Relic's alerting is included in the platform, but dedicated on-call scheduling and escalation are not -- most teams using New Relic pair it with PagerDuty ($21-41/user/month) or OpsGenie ($9-35/user/month) for that layer. Alert24 replaces that additional tool at a lower price.
| Component | New Relic + Third-Party Tools | Alert24 |
|---|---|---|
| On-call scheduling | PagerDuty/OpsGenie ($9-41/user/month) | Included |
| Status page | Statuspage.io ($79-399/month) | Included |
| Uptime monitoring | Included in New Relic Synthetics | Included |
| Dependency monitoring | Not available | Included |
| Incident management total (10 users) | $169-809/mo | $180/mo |
That is a significant saving on the incident management layer alone, while keeping New Relic for the observability it excels at.
Public status pages. New Relic does not offer public-facing status pages. If your customers need a status.yourcompany.com page, you need a separate tool -- usually Atlassian Statuspage at $79-399/month. Alert24 includes auto-updating status pages on every plan. When a monitor detects a problem, the status page updates automatically without human intervention.
Third-party dependency monitoring. Alert24 monitors 2,000+ third-party service status pages -- AWS, Stripe, Cloudflare, GitHub, Twilio, and more -- and alerts you when a dependency has issues. When your production outage is caused by an AWS regional failure, Alert24 tells you immediately instead of your team spending 30 minutes debugging code that is not broken. New Relic monitors your own infrastructure brilliantly, but does not track third-party provider status.
Simpler incident response workflow. With Alert24, a failed monitor check automatically creates an incident, pages the on-call engineer via SMS or voice call, and updates the public status page -- all in a single workflow. With New Relic, you configure alert conditions, which fire notifications, which go to PagerDuty or OpsGenie, which pages someone, and then someone has to manually update a separate status page tool. More moving parts, more vendors, more cost.
Post-incident reviews on all plans. Alert24 includes post-incident review workflows with action items, metrics, and publishable summaries on every paid plan. New Relic does not have a dedicated postmortem feature -- teams typically use dashboards and ad-hoc NRQL queries to reconstruct timelines, which works but is not the same as a structured review workflow.
The Best Architecture: Use Both
Here is the setup we recommend for teams already using New Relic:
Keep New Relic for:
- APM and distributed tracing
- Infrastructure monitoring (hosts, containers, Kubernetes, serverless)
- Log management and analytics
- Browser monitoring and real user metrics
- NRQL-powered dashboards and custom queries
- AIOps and anomaly detection
- Service levels (SLI/SLO tracking)
Use Alert24 for:
- On-call scheduling and escalation policies
- Multi-channel incident alerting (SMS, voice, Slack, Teams)
- Public status pages with auto-updating
- Third-party dependency monitoring
- Incident lifecycle management and post-incident reviews
- Uptime monitoring for external-facing endpoints
Connect them: Route New Relic alerts to Alert24 via webhooks. When New Relic detects an application performance issue or infrastructure problem, it triggers Alert24's escalation engine, which pages the right person and updates your status page. You get New Relic's deep observability with Alert24's incident communication workflow.
This "best of both" approach gives you:
- New Relic's unmatched observability, APM, and NRQL query power
- Alert24's incident management at a fraction of what PagerDuty or OpsGenie costs
- Public status pages that neither New Relic nor most incident management tools include
- Third-party dependency monitoring that no observability tool provides
Who Should Add Alert24 to Their New Relic Stack
- Teams using New Relic plus PagerDuty or OpsGenie. Switch the incident management layer to Alert24 and save $100-400/month while getting status pages and dependency monitoring included.
- Teams using New Relic plus a separate Statuspage subscription. Alert24 replaces Statuspage and adds incident management. One fewer vendor, one fewer bill.
- Teams that have been burned by third-party outages. If you have ever spent 30 minutes debugging your own code only to discover it was an AWS or Stripe outage, Alert24's dependency monitoring pays for itself the first time it happens.
- Teams that need a public status page. New Relic does not offer one. Rather than paying $79/month or more for Statuspage.io, get a status page plus incident management for $18/month per team member.
- Small teams on New Relic's free tier. If you are using New Relic's generous free tier for observability, adding Alert24 gives you a complete incident management and status page solution for $18/month -- less than any other combination of tools.
Who Should Stick With New Relic's Built-In Alerting
- Teams that only need basic alert routing. If your incident workflow is "New Relic detects a problem, sends a Slack notification, someone fixes it" -- and you do not need on-call scheduling, escalation policies, or a public status page -- New Relic's built-in alerting is sufficient. No need to add another tool.
- Teams deeply embedded in New Relic's Incident Intelligence. If you rely heavily on New Relic's AIOps-powered incident correlation, noise reduction, and root cause analysis, and your team's workflow is built around those features, the switching cost of moving alerting to a separate tool may not be worthwhile.
- Enterprise teams with existing PagerDuty contracts. If your organization has a negotiated PagerDuty enterprise contract and the cost is already sunk, adding Alert24 alongside it may create unnecessary overlap. Evaluate whether status pages and dependency monitoring alone justify the addition.
- Teams that need a native mobile app. New Relic's mobile app lets you monitor dashboards and respond to alerts from your phone. Alert24 does not have a native mobile app -- if mobile dashboard access is critical to your workflow, New Relic's app plus a tool like PagerDuty may be a better fit.
Setting Up Alert24 Alongside New Relic
- Create a New Relic webhook notification channel. In New Relic, set up a webhook destination that posts to Alert24's incident API when an alert condition fires. This takes about 5 minutes.
- Or use email-to-incident parsing. Configure New Relic alert notifications to email your Alert24 inbound address. Alert24 parses the alert and creates an incident automatically.
- Set up on-call schedules. Configure rotation schedules and escalation policies in Alert24. When New Relic fires an alert, Alert24 pages the right engineer.
- Create your status page. Build a public status page in Alert24 and link it to your monitoring checks and services. Status updates flow automatically.
- Enable dependency monitoring. Select the third-party services your application depends on. Alert24 watches their status pages and alerts you when they report issues.
Most teams complete this setup in under an hour.
The Bottom Line
New Relic is an exceptional observability platform. Its APM, distributed tracing, NRQL query language, and generous free tier make it one of the best tools for understanding what is happening inside your systems.
But New Relic is not a dedicated incident management or status page platform. Most teams using New Relic still need PagerDuty or OpsGenie for on-call scheduling, Statuspage for customer communication, and they have no solution at all for third-party dependency monitoring. That is three tools and three bills on top of New Relic.
Alert24 replaces those additional tools with a single platform at $18/month per team member. On-call scheduling, escalation policies, multi-channel alerting, auto-updating status pages, third-party dependency monitoring, and post-incident reviews -- all included.
Use each tool for what it does best. New Relic for seeing inside your systems. Alert24 for responding when something goes wrong and keeping your customers informed.
Ready to add Alert24 to your New Relic stack? Start a free trial -- no credit card required. Connect New Relic alerts to Alert24 in under 10 minutes and get on-call scheduling, status pages, and dependency monitoring immediately.