RoRvsWild vs. New Relic

We are making RoRvsWild, a monitoring tool for Ruby on Rails applications. New relic does that too, and much more.

RoRvsWild vs. New Relic seems like an unfair fight.
We might be biased, but like for David vs. Goliath or Ukraine vs. Russia, there is always a chance the kid kicks the ass of the giant.

New Relic

New Relic is the OG in web app monitoring. They have been the only choice for a while.

Today New Relic is also known as $NEWR, a public company with thousands of employees and huge revenue. Their stock rises and pleases their shareholders when they announce massive layoffs or when there is a rumor they are about to sell to an investment firm. This week alone, they fired 200 employees after the investment firm finally canceled their offer.
Still, they lose a staggering amount of money, $52 million in the last quarter alone, with a big part of their expenses in marketing and sales.
For how long can they stay in business? Are they too big to fail? Who knows? Probably their Chief Revenue Officer who just sold his shares.

New Relic is a powerful and feature-rich tool with a steep learning curve. They support all languages and target mainly «enterprises» with specialized DevOps teams. Understanding its graphs and menus requires a significant investment of time and effort.

They have a free plan, but their pricing structure can quickly get expensive. The cost explodes as you add more people, monitor additional hosts, etc. We have been using New Relic in another life when working in a comfortably VC-funded startup. It was overkill. The startup does not exist anymore.

Their agent is heavier as they grab much more data. They now collect all your logs by default, which some consider a shady tactic to get everyone to pay more and grow their revenue. It also raises privacy concerns, as they feed AI with your data; and use a massive count of trackers.

Last but not least, people frequently report challenges with their support services, including slow response times.

RoRvsWild

RoRvsWild is an independent company. We have no investors and a team of 2. The only people we have to please are our customers.

RoRvsWild is Ruby on Rails only. In the Rails community, we like to boast about how some big companies like Shopify use Rails. But in reality, most teams using Rails are small, as this framework makes it relatively easy to launch an app. It is unlikely you have a DevOps, performances, or site reliability team. Rails developers generally have to take care of performances and errors themselves.
RoRvsWild has no learning curve and is the fastest way to find an issue and get back to code.

We don’t have a free plan, but our simple pricing is requests based, with no hidden costs, much more affordable and granular. We certainly need to improve our marketing and communication, but we are not losing money; we are here for the long run.

We do our best to answer every request we get. We cannot escalate an issue. We all receive support emails, and you receive direct answers from the people building the service. You also get a high probability your feedback and feature requests will make it into the product.

So yes, we are taking our chance. Sometimes, we feel like we have to keep going and that New Relic will soon be a piece of history.