Instana Dynamic APM vs New Relic comparison

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Instana Dynamic APM

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 24, 2024

New Relic and Instana Dynamic APM are both popular application performance monitoring solutions. New Relic has an advantage in pricing and customer support, while Instana Dynamic APM stands out with advanced feature sets.

Features: New Relic offers comprehensive dashboards, extensibility, and straightforward deployments. Instana Dynamic APM provides automated root cause analysis, AI-driven insights, and deep observability.

Room for Improvement: New Relic needs better log management capabilities, enhanced system performance, and improved integration options. Instana Dynamic APM could benefit from better integration options, more detailed documentation, and further advancements in user interface.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: New Relic offers straightforward deployment processes and robust customer support. Instana Dynamic APM requires more initial configuration but offers competent customer service.

Pricing and ROI: New Relic is cost-effective and provides significant ROI due to competitive pricing. Instana Dynamic APM demands a higher investment but justifies it with advanced features and insights, achieving good ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed Instana Dynamic APM vs. New Relic Report (Updated: February 2026).

Instana Dynamic APM vs. New Relic

February 2026

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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

Instana Dynamic APM

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

31st

Average Rating

7.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

New Relic

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

4th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

172

Ranking in other categories

Network Monitoring Software (8th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (9th), IT Operations Analytics (3rd), Mobile APM (3rd), Cloud Monitoring Software (5th), AIOps (4th)

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Instana Dynamic APM is 1.1%, up from 1.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of New Relic is 4.0%, down from 7.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
New Relic	4.0%
Instana Dynamic APM	1.1%
Other	94.9%

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

Featured Reviews

Muhammad Jawwad Hassan

IT Consultant at Arcana Info

A really good GUI that is easy for non-technical users to understand

Our company uses the solution for one of our bank clients. We use App Connect middleware to monitor services and applications such as Docker, Kubernetes, MongoDB, and MS SQL Server. We also monitor the bottleneck for all servers. We currently have 20 users at one of our branches. We plan to expand…

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BasilJiji

System Engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

Real-time alerts have reduced server outage impact and support fast incident response

In the dashboard, if they could show a little more metrics regarding the application and related things, that would be how New Relic could be improved. Currently, there are things showing from the server level and application level, but it can be improved. That is what I felt. Regarding user interface, I do not feel much concern, but for some kind of issues when we are trying to get support from the New Relic team, their SLA seems to be long. They are taking seven to ten working days for resolving some kind of scenario or issue. That is a bit difficult for us. If they could improve the customer support by reducing their SLA within three to five days, if they could remediate everything, that will be so much helpful. When it comes to the customer support part, I felt they need to be a little more improved on that part. The support overall is good, but they can improve. That is the reason I have given it eight out of ten.

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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 most valuable feature of Instana Dynamic APM is auto-instrumentation."

"Visually, it's very good. It provides everything needed for dynamic detection, which is very useful."

"If a key monitored value has crossed a threshold, it sends out an alert. And the solution is able to intelligently find out if something is beyond the range that it normally resides in."

"It is a stable solution."

"The detailing of our application behavior and user experience is most valuable. In case there is an issue, we typically use Instana to figure it out. We can drill down to the application and figure out what's going on and where the issue is."

"The platform’s most valuable feature is the ability to monitor the performance of containers for request and response analysis."

"Instana is very fast to implement and deploy because the dashboards are automated and don't need configuration."

"Sometimes it's able to provide a proper RCA on its own. It's able to correlate different events that occurred and that becomes like an RCA in itself."

More Instana Dynamic APM pros

"The VPN is one of the solution's most valuable features for us."

"New Relic has positively impacted my organization regarding my main area of interest, which is performance tests, and by using New Relic, I received a lot of information to improve my systems."

"The breakdown of the response time of different components and getting in-depth details of the slow component are the most valuable features. It is easy to use, and it gets the job done."

"The most valuable features of New Relic are the reports and ease of use."

"The most valuable feature is the ability to receive in-depth information about applications. It can detect a lot of important information."

"New Relic's dashboard is nice, and it's reliable. It's also compatible with many services, especially Java and the Python ecosystem."

"What I like best about New Relic APM is its user interface because it's simple. The most valuable feature of New Relic APM is end-to-end monitoring."

"The solution is quite stable."

More New Relic pros

Cons

"Maybe log monitoring could be better."

"They could improve the product’s dashboards and provide more dashboard options."

"The solution's monitoring is pretty weak and should be improved."

"We'd always like to see additional functionalities."

"Many managers, as well as our customers, used to ask for reports, such as "top X number of queries that are slow," or "top pages that have the highest number of issues." This is something that can be improved by Instana. Currently, they don't have that kind of reporting available out-of-the-box."

"The configuration of Instana Dynamic APM needs improvement because it requires quite a bit of work."

"I think that Instana should improve the university and the certification process, so the users can find experts in Instana with their certification module process."

"New Relic has a better UI in terms of how it presents the data."

More Instana Dynamic APM cons

"It is very difficult to award the service level cycles at an endpoint level."

"They don't have an opportunity to share the dashboard with the public. If you want to share it with stakeholders or people outside the organization who just want to have a look at a couple of metrics, you can't do that without onboarding them to the product itself."

"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."

"In addition, its difficult to have a predictive tool to see how the application would behave in the future when it basically only shows the historical data."

"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."

"New Relic APM is a good tool, and it has a database of failures, but it could use a list of customer-specific failures. New Relic APM should be able to give my company advanced analytics through AI."

"We have had issues with our agents going offline."

"New Relic can be improved, particularly by enhancing the UI, which is currently a bit off."

More New Relic cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Instana Dynamic APM is more affordable for small and medium-sized companies compared to other vendors."

"Pricing is quite competitive. Dynatrace, AppDynamics, and New Relic were all several times more expensive than Instana, both the on-prem and the SaaS versions. Price-wise they are a lot more competitive than anyone else out there."

"It's reasonably priced and manageable, especially for individuals who grasp the significance of application monitoring."

"The pricing is $1,200 per year which is a bit high compared to other vendors."

"The solution is less expensive than one of its competitors."

"The solution's pricing is comparable to other products."

"Its pricing isn't a big pain point. Its pricing seems to be better than some of the other competing products in the market, but they also have some of the features and functionalities that are better than Instana."

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

"This is an expensive tool."

"The price depends on how many agents you want."

"The price of the solution could be less expensive. You have to pay a lot for each user. There is an additional cost for extra features."

"Because of budget, we are not using the mobile app part of this tool."

"They gave us aggressive discounts when they were brought in for the first time, but they have also kept them for the year-on-year renewals, which has been absolutely fine."

"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."

"We spend somewhere around $5,000 to $6,000 per month with an annual recommitment of maybe $60,000. These are just ballpark figures."

More New Relic 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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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

25%

Manufacturing Company

12%

Computer Software Company

Retailer

Financial Services Firm

13%

Computer Software Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

Retailer

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	3
Midsize Enterprise	6
Large Enterprise	5

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	65
Midsize Enterprise	50
Large Enterprise	76

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Instana Dynamic APM?

The platform’s most valuable feature is the ability to monitor the performance of containers for request and response analysis.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Instana Dynamic APM?

I rate the pricing a seven out of ten. There are no additional costs associated with the product.

What needs improvement with Instana Dynamic APM?

Sometimes, the issue arises from user changes, such as adjusting firewall settings without proper consideration, leading to compatibility issues within the network monitoring.

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...

What do you like most about New Relic Insights?

The product's initial setup phase was very easy.

What needs improvement with New Relic Insights?

When considering how New Relic can be improved, the only thing that could be a bit confusing is that there are many things in New Relic, and sometimes I need to know where to find some visualizatio...

Dynatrace vs Instana Dynamic APM

Comparisons

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Compared 12% of the time

Broadcom DX Application Performance Management vs Instana Dynamic APM

Compared 5% of the time

Datadog vs Instana Dynamic APM

Compared 5% of the time

ServiceNow Cloud Observability vs Instana Dynamic APM

Compared 5% of the time

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Dynatrace vs New Relic

Compared 9% of the time

Datadog vs New Relic

Compared 7% of the time

Splunk AppDynamics vs New Relic

Compared 6% of the time

Elastic Observability vs New Relic

Compared 3% of the time

Azure Monitor vs New Relic

Compared 3% of the time

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Product Reports

Download Instana Dynamic APM product report

Instana Dynamic APM

January 2026

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January 2026

Also Known As

No data available

New Relic Browser, New Relic Applied Intelligence, New Relic Insights, New Relic Synthetics, New Relic Servers, New Relic APM

Overview

Instana’s Enterprise Observability Platform, powered by automated Application Performance Monitoring, discovers and maps all services, infrastructure, and their inter-dependencies automatically. Instana ingests all observability metrics, traces each request, profiles every process, and updates application dependency maps in real-time to deliver the context and actionable feedback needed by Dev+Ops to optimize application performance, enable innovation, and mitigate risk to help them add value and efficiency to the pipeline. Learn more at https://instana.com.

Instana

New Relic offers real-time application monitoring and insight into performance bottlenecks. Its customizable dashboards and APM integration provide efficient operational support, while server performance alerts ensure quick issue detection.

New Relic provides comprehensive monitoring of application performance, tracking bottlenecks across databases and front-end components. Users employ it for server and infrastructure monitoring, as well as analyzing key metrics such as CPU and memory usage. The solution's ability to integrate with tools like PagerDuty enhances incident management capabilities. However, users have expressed a need for improvements in query language simplicity, more detailed historical insights, and better mobile app monitoring support.

What are New Relic's most important features?

Real-Time Monitoring: Provides instant visibility into application performance.
Detailed Transaction Tracing: Identifies specific transaction issues quickly.
Error Rate Tracking: Monitors and reports on error occurrences efficiently.
Customizable Dashboards: Tailors dashboard views for specific needs.
APM Integration: Seamlessly integrates with application performance management tools.

What benefits and ROI should be considered?

Operational Efficiency: Quick issue detection reduces downtime.
Improved Debugging: Enhanced error analysis supports rapid problem resolution.
Comprehensive Monitoring: Offers a holistic view of application performance and user behavior.
Incident Management: Integration with incident tools helps streamline responses.
Efficient Alerts: Rapid alert systems ensure timely notifications of issues.

In industries like e-commerce and financial services, New Relic supports application performance monitoring to enhance user experience and system reliability. Organizations leverage its insights for optimizing performance, particularly in server operations and infrastructure management. Its ability to monitor API failures through synthetic monitoring is crucial for maintaining high service levels.

Sample Customers

Daxko Lifts Fitness Studios Through COVID Regulations with Quick Engineering PivotsAltissia Meets SLAs to Support Student DeadlinesImmocloud Unlocks Observability to Modernize Real EstateEnento Group Boosts Service Reliability with Real-Time Visibility into Application Performance Instana’s Observability for Amazon EKS Helps Yara Deliver Digital Farming Solutions

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