New Relic vs Sentry: What are the differences?

New Relic and Sentry are both popular monitoring tools used by developers to track and resolve issues in their applications. While they serve a similar purpose, there are several key differences between the two.

1. Core Functionality: New Relic is primarily focused on application performance monitoring and observability. It provides real-time insights into the performance of your application, including response times, error rates, and throughput. On the other hand, Sentry focuses on error monitoring and crash reporting. It captures and analyzes exceptions and errors in your code, helping you identify and resolve bugs.

2. Alerting Capabilities: New Relic offers comprehensive alerting capabilities, allowing you to set up custom alerts based on various metrics and thresholds. You can receive notifications via email, SMS, or other channels when a specific condition is met. Sentry, on the other hand, provides limited alerting functionality and is primarily focused on error reporting rather than proactive monitoring.

3. Deployment Flexibility: New Relic offers cloud-based solutions as well as on-premises deployment options. This flexibility allows you to choose the deployment model that best suits your needs and security requirements. Sentry, on the other hand, is primarily offered as a cloud-based service, although there are open-source options available for self-hosting.

4. Community and Ecosystem: New Relic has a large and active community, with a wide range of plugins and integrations available. It integrates well with popular platforms and frameworks, making it easier to collect and analyze data from your applications. Sentry, although less popular, also has an active community and a growing ecosystem of integrations, particularly with popular programming languages and frameworks.

5. Pricing: New Relic offers various pricing plans based on the features and scale of your applications. Pricing is typically based on the number of hosts or containers monitored and the level of support required. Sentry, on the other hand, has a more simplified pricing model, primarily based on the number of events captured and stored.

In summary, New Relic and Sentry differ in their core functionality, alerting capabilities, deployment flexibility, community support, and pricing models. New Relic focuses on application performance monitoring, while Sentry is more focused on error monitoring and crash reporting. Both tools have their strengths and are designed to help developers improve the quality and reliability of their applications.