Lunary vs New Relic AI Monitoring
Both are observability & tracing tools. Here is how they actually differ on price, billing model and deployment.
Lunary
A lightweight Apache-2.0 observability platform aimed at RAG pipelines and chatbots. The fastest path from nothing to basic tracing, with a free tier metered daily rather than monthly - which catches people out.
New Relic AI Monitoring
LLM monitoring layered onto New Relic's APM platform, billed on data ingested - which is close to the worst possible meter for verbose agent traces. One reported deployment went from $1,400 to $12,000 a month after turning it on.
| Lunary | New Relic AI Monitoring | |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Observability & Tracing | Observability & Tracing |
| Our rating | 3/5 | 2/5 |
| Starting price | Around $20-30/mo | $0.40/GB ingested |
| Billing meter | event | gb-ingested |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free self-hosting | Yes, free | No or paid tier only |
| Best for | Small teams shipping RAG pipelines or chatbots who want basic tracing working this afternoon, and who will either stay small or self-host before volume becomes expensive. | Organisations already standardised on New Relic for APM, logs, Kubernetes and SRE workflows, running relatively low-volume LLM features, who need correlation more than evaluation. |
Our verdict on Lunary
Lunary is a good starter tool that knows what it is. It is optimised for RAG pipelines and chatbots rather than trying to be a complete AI engineering platform, it is Apache 2.0 and self-hostable, and it is among the fastest things in the category to get running. Radar - which buckets responses against criteria you define - is a genuinely useful idea for spotting patterns that individual traces hide. Two caveats matter. The free tier is 1,000 events per day rather than per month, which is a meaningfully tighter constraint than the headline suggests and will not survive a real chatbot for long. And published pricing is inconsistent across sources in a way we could not resolve, with figures ranging from around $20 to $200 a month depending on where you look. Against Langfuse it is lighter on nearly every axis, and Langfuse is the better default for most teams. Lunary earns its place when speed to first trace matters more than depth.
Full Lunary review →Our verdict on New Relic AI Monitoring
New Relic AI Monitoring makes sense for exactly one buyer - the organisation already committed to New Relic - and is a poor choice for anyone else. The correlation story is real, and the applied intelligence and SRE agent tooling is more mature than anything the AI-native vendors offer. But two structural problems dominate. First, the billing meter is data ingested, and LLM traces are among the most verbose telemetry in existence - prompts, completions, tool payloads and retrieved context routinely make a single trace 5 to 50 KB. Charging per gigabyte for that is close to the worst possible fit, and one reported deployment saw its bill go from $1,400 to between $9,500 and $12,000 a month after AI Monitoring volumes were counted. Second, it does not evaluate anything. There is no faithfulness, relevance or hallucination scoring, and no annotation or dataset curation. It tells you what your LLM did and what it cost, not whether the output was any good. If you need evaluation, you are buying a second tool regardless.
Full New Relic AI Monitoring review →Frequently Asked Questions
What is the main difference between Lunary and New Relic AI Monitoring?
Lunary: Small teams shipping RAG pipelines or chatbots who want basic tracing working this afternoon, and who will either stay small or self-host before volume becomes expensive. New Relic AI Monitoring: Organisations already standardised on New Relic for APM, logs, Kubernetes and SRE workflows, running relatively low-volume LLM features, who need correlation more than evaluation. Both sit in Observability & Tracing, so the decision usually comes down to billing model and deployment rather than raw capability.
Which is cheaper, Lunary or New Relic AI Monitoring?
It depends entirely on your workload shape, because they meter differently - Lunary bills on event and New Relic AI Monitoring bills on gb-ingested. Published starting prices are Around $20-30/mo and $0.40/GB ingested respectively, but those numbers are not comparable until you apply them to the same traffic. Use our cost calculator to model both against your own request volume and span count.
Can I self-host Lunary or New Relic AI Monitoring?
Lunary: Yes, free. New Relic AI Monitoring: No or paid tier only. Free self-hosting means no licence fee, not no cost - you still own the infrastructure, upgrades and on-call.