Slowpoke vs New Relic
New Relic charges two meters at once: about $0.40 per gigabyte ingested, and a licence for each person who logs in. Slowpoke has neither. It runs on your machines, the whole team can open it, and the only thing it measures is how much time your users lose.
The short answer
Which one you should pick
New Relic is a broad, mature platform and its free tier is genuinely generous. The question is what happens when the team grows and the data does.
Choose New Relic if
You need one platform and can pay per seat
- You want APM, infrastructure, logs, browser and mobile monitoring under one login.
- You need alerting, incident workflows and SLO tracking as part of the same product.
- Your team is small enough, or your ingest low enough, that the free tier actually covers you.
- You would rather buy maturity than run anything yourself.
Choose Slowpoke if
You would rather not pay per person who looks
- You want every engineer to be able to see what is slow, without a licence decision each time.
- Your ingest is the thing you are trying to reduce, and you do not want it metered.
- You need the infrastructure you inherited mapped for you, not an empty dashboard to fill.
- You want the expensive findings turned into work with an owner and a finish line.
- Your data stays on your machines, and that is not negotiable.
Side by side
Slowpoke and New Relic, line by line
Written to be fair, including where New Relic is the better tool. If a row here is wrong or out of date, that is a bug: open an issue and it gets corrected.
| Aspect | Slowpoke | New Relic |
|---|---|---|
| What it answers | What it costs you, and what to fix first | What is happening, across a broad platform |
| Price model | No meter of any kind | About $0.40 per GB ingested ($0.60 for Data Plus), plus per-user licences |
| Cost of more engineers looking | €0 | A Full Platform or Core user licence each |
| Cost of more traffic | €0 | More gigabytes ingested |
| Free tier | The whole thing, forever | 100 GB a month and one full user |
| Where your data lives | Your machines, always | New Relic's cloud |
| Prioritised for you | One list, in seconds of waiting per day | Charts, alerts and NRQL you write |
| Query plans with a fix | Real EXPLAIN, twelve named diagnoses | Slow query traces, no recommendation |
| Maps what you inherited | One command reads each machine | You tell it what to instrument |
| Says what it cannot see | Yes, with the lines that fix it | — |
| Work that verifies itself | Missions closed by measurement | — |
| Live incident response | Not its job | Alerting, SLOs, incident workflows |
| Breadth | Performance debt only | APM, infra, logs, browser, mobile, synthetics |
Two meters, and one of them punishes the behaviour you want
New Relic bills on data ingested — roughly $0.40 per gigabyte, or $0.60 on Data Plus — and separately on people. Users are split into Full Platform and Core tiers, and a fifteen-person engineering team with five full and ten core users runs to a four-figure monthly sum in licences alone, before a single gigabyte is counted.
The ingest meter has the same awkward shape as any usage-based observability pricing: the busier and slower your system gets, the more it costs to watch. The seat meter is worse, because it prices the thing you are trying to encourage. A performance culture means more engineers looking at performance data more often, and per-seat licensing makes every one of those people a line item.
Slowpoke has no seats and no ingest meter. It is open source and self-hosted, so the entire team can have an account and the cost does not move.
A platform you fill in, against a tool that arrives with an answer
New Relic gives you an enormous, capable surface and a query language to interrogate it. That is the right product if you already know what you are looking for.
If you have just inherited the system, you do not. Slowpoke starts from the other end: one command per machine reads what is there — nginx sites, PHP-FPM pools, MySQL and PostgreSQL, Redis, and the applications with their framework — writes its own configuration, and draws the map. Fifteen minutes later there is a list, ordered by seconds of waiting per day, and you did not have to know which question to ask.
The part neither platform does: making the fix happen
Finding the slow query has not been the hard part for years. Getting it fixed is. Debt tickets are written by people who did not create the debt, sit in a backlog, and get closed by a tick in Jira that proves nothing.
Slowpoke turns the expensive items into missions with an owner, an effort estimate and a finish line, and refuses to call one done until the measured cost has stayed down for three windows. A deploy that makes something twice as slow becomes a boss with that commit's name on it. This is the part that makes the numbers turn into shipped changes, and no APM does it.
Can you run both?
Yes. Slowpoke never sits in the request path and reads what your servers already write, so it adds nothing to your ingest bill and cannot conflict with a New Relic agent. Several teams use the Slowpoke debt report precisely to argue for the budget the New Relic contract sits in.
FAQ
Slowpoke and New Relic, asked plainly
Is Slowpoke a free New Relic alternative?
Does Slowpoke charge per user?
Will Slowpoke increase my New Relic bill?
Can I keep New Relic and still use Slowpoke?
Find out what you inherited
Fifteen minutes on one server, and the first number is yours — it costs nothing to find out.