A New Relic alternative for PHP
when you need the traces, not the platform.
New Relic is a full observability platform: infrastructure, logs, browser, synthetics, alerting, and an APM agent for most languages. If you use that platform, this page will not talk you out of it — you would be replacing ten things with one, and that is a bad trade.
This page is for the other case: you bought an APM because one PHP application was slow and nobody could say why. That is a much smaller problem than the one New Relic solves, and it is priced accordingly.
Both are read-only and need no account, no card and nothing installed.
What it takes to install each one
New Relic's requirements below are quoted from its own PHP agent documentation, read on 22 September 2026. If something has changed, tell us and we will correct it.
| New Relic PHP agent | PHPRay | |
|---|---|---|
| Root to install | Yes. The docs list “read/write access to the PHP extensions directory”, “read/write access to PHP configuration data” and “restart the web server or PHP process pool”. | No. The extension can be loaded from your own php.ini, and the
WordPress plugin needs neither an extension nor a daemon. |
| Shared hosting | Not addressed by the documentation; in practice the install steps above are not available to you on shared hosting. | Yes — this is the case it was built for: CageFS, LiteSpeed lsphp, mod_php. |
| Extra process | A daemon alongside PHP. | A single binary you can run as your own user. |
| Thread-safe PHP | “PHP builds that are compiled with Zend Thread Safety (ZTS) are not supported.” | Supported. |
| Where the data goes | New Relic's cloud. | Your server. The Cloud console is optional and stored in the EU. |
| Licence | Proprietary. | Apache-2.0 core, self-hostable. |
What it costs to keep
New Relic's pricing has two axes, and the second is the one that surprises teams: you pay for ingested data and for the people who look at it.
| New Relic | PHPRay | |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier | 100 GB of ingest a month and one full platform user. | Local core unlimited and free; Cloud Free covers one site, 10k traces a day, 7 days of history, no card. |
| Per person | Standard: $10 for the first user, $99 for each additional (maximum five). Pro: $349 per user per month on an annual commitment, $418.80 paying monthly. | Nothing. Plans are priced per site, not per person. |
| Per data | $0.40 per GB beyond the free 100 GB ($0.60 on Data Plus). | Included in the plan; the local core stores on your own disk. |
| Entry price | Free until you add a second person who needs to look. | $0 local, Cloud from $19/month for three sites. |
Figures read from newrelic.com/pricing on 22 September 2026. A team of four engineers on Pro is $1,396 a month before a single gigabyte of data.
What you give up
Being straight about this matters more than winning the comparison. PHPRay does not do:
- Infrastructure and host monitoring. No CPU/disk/network agents, no Kubernetes, no cloud integrations.
- Log management. We record the PHP errors attached to a request, not your log pipeline.
- Browser, mobile and synthetic monitoring. Nothing runs in the user's browser.
- Distributed tracing across languages. We trace PHP.
If two or more of those are load-bearing for you, a platform is the right answer and New Relic is a good one.
What you get instead
- Every request, not a sample. One record per request: wall time, CPU, memory, every SQL query as a fingerprint with the literals stripped, outbound HTTP, PHP errors and N+1 patterns. The checkout that failed once is still there tomorrow.
- Per-plugin attribution. “The shop got slow” becomes a named plugin, a named query and the day it changed.
- A report you can send. One HTML file — or a link — that the site owner can read without installing anything.
- Measured overhead, published with the method. Recording every request cost 40.7 ms against a 40.2 ms baseline on a real WordPress page. Per-function attribution adds about 4% on that page and 27% on a 48 ms micro-benchmark — we publish the inconvenient number too.
The honest summary
New Relic sells a platform and charges for the platform. If your actual question is “which PHP request is slow, and since when”, you are buying a very large tool for a specific job, paying per person for the privilege, and you still cannot install it on shared hosting.
Check it against your own site
The local core is Apache-2.0 and installs in one line — no account, no card. Or read a real report from a production WooCommerce shop first.
Install locally Read a real reportRead next
- What always-on tracing costs — the measurement behind the numbers above.
- Blackfire alternative — including where Blackfire wins.
- Xdebug alternative — what to keep Xdebug for.
- Plans and pricing — priced per site, not per person.