how sixty compares — Full-stack observability platform
Sixty vs New Relic
The same breadth as Datadog on a friendlier meter, with a genuinely large free tier — and the same afternoon of setup before it says anything.
What New Relic is good at
New Relic did the most honest thing anybody in this market has done in a decade: it stopped charging per host. The meter is data ingested and people who log in, and the first 100 GB every month costs nothing — which for a small application is genuinely most of the way to free, and unlimited people can query it and build dashboards without becoming a billing line.
Under that, it is a real platform with the breadth to match: APM, infrastructure, logs, browser, mobile, synthetics, and errors, all queryable in one language. The database view is good, the deployment markers work, and the free tier is large enough that trying it costs you an afternoon rather than a purchase order.
New Relic costs 100 GB a month free, then $0.35 per GB and $99 per full user, as published on their pricing page in August 2026. Sixty is €14.99 a month, flat.
What Sixty does differently
The afternoon is the catch, and it is the same one as with any platform. New Relic gives you a very good instrument panel and leaves the flying to you: which dashboards to keep, which alert conditions to write, what a normal Tuesday looks like for this endpoint. The default state is a lot of accurate charts and no opinion, and an opinion is the thing somebody shipping a side project every week is short of.
The other thing worth saying plainly is that gigabytes are a meter you do not control and cannot easily predict. It is fairer than per host and it is still usage-based, which means the month your app gets popular is the month the bill moves — and the first time most people look closely at ingest is after that has happened.
Sixty measures one thing and tells you what it means. It compares this release against the last one, and when the shape of the work changed it says which change did it, in a sentence, and hands the evidence to the agent that will fix it. There is nothing to build, and the price does not move when your traffic does.
Side by side
The same eleven questions the full comparison asks of every tool, with the two rows Sixty loses left in.
| What is being compared | Sixty | New Relic |
|---|---|---|
| What you set upBefore it can tell you anything at all. | Nothing. One command, no dashboards, no thresholds | Dashboards and alert conditions, on top of curated views |
| Time to the first findingInstall to a sentence that names a cause. | Your next deploy | Hours — installing is fast, deciding what is wrong is not |
| Compares one release to the lastAutomatically, without being asked a question. | Yes — every finding is one release against the one before | Yes, via change tracking and deployment markers |
| Rows per call, queries per renderThe shape of what your database work returns, not how long it took. | Yes, this is the core signal | Slow query traces, yes. A baseline for rows returned, no |
| Page vitals per routeLargest paint, interaction response, layout shift. | Yes, broken down by country | Yes — browser monitoring, billed as ingest |
| Failures that report successEmpty results, refused requests, buttons wired to nothing. | Yes — this is most of what it finds | Only what you write an alert condition for |
| Evidence handed to your coding agentNot a dashboard to read — a payload the thing that writes your code can act on. | Yes, over MCP, with the numbers and stack frames attached | An MCP server you can ask questions of |
| Data collected about your usersWhat ends up on somebody else’s server because you installed it. | None. No IDs, no cookies, no URLs, no replay | Session IDs, and user attributes if you set them |
| Infrastructure, logs, containersHosts, pods, queues — the layer under the application. | No | Yes |
| Runtimes it measuresServer-side. Browser coverage is separate and mostly universal. | Node and Postgres. Any front end, any backend language | Everything |
| Where the bill startsList price for a comparable product, read August 2026. | €14.99 a month, flat | Free to 100 GB, then $0.35 / GB |
Which one to pick
Pick New Relic when
- You want one tool over your whole stack and are willing to spend a day on it.
- Your services are not JavaScript, or not all of them are.
- You need logs and infrastructure alongside application traces.
- The free 100 GB genuinely covers you and you would rather not pay anything.
Pick Sixty when
- You do not want to build a dashboard or write an alert condition, ever.
- The signal you need is "what did this deploy change", not "what is happening right now".
- You want a bill that does not move when your app has a good week.
- Your fix should arrive in your editor rather than in your inbox.
These are not mutually exclusive and the honest answer is often both. Nothing here refuses to run alongside New Relic, and a lot of people keep it.
Questions people actually ask
Is New Relic's free tier enough for a small app?
Often, yes — 100 GB a month is a lot of telemetry for one application, and if what you need is charts and the ability to go and look, it is a fair place to start. What the free tier does not change is that you are the one who has to notice something, decide it is abnormal, and work out which deploy caused it.
Does Sixty do logs?
No, and it is not planned. Logs are a search problem with a storage bill attached, which is a different product from this one. Sixty is measurements about the shape of your work, which is why it fits in a flat price.
The other comparisons
Sixty vs Datadog
Everything, for everyone, billed per host. Unbeatable if you run infrastructure; a lot of product to carry if you run one app on Vercel.
Error tracking, plus performanceSixty vs Sentry
Best-in-class for the crash you can see. The gap is the failure that never throws — and what it stores about the person who hit it.
Open-source stack, hostedSixty vs Grafana Cloud
The most flexible and the most work. Prometheus, Loki, Tempo and OpenTelemetry, hosted for you — and still a project rather than a product.
Front-end analytics, bundledSixty vs Vercel Speed Insights
Real page timings with one checkbox, from the platform you deploy to. It stops at the edge of the browser — nothing under it is measured.