Checkly vs New Relic: Playwright MaC or Broad Synthetics + Compliance?

Checkly and New Relic both sell synthetic monitoring, but they sit in different parts of the stack. Checkly is a focused, Playwright-native product for teams that want monitors as code. New Relic is a full observability platform where synthetics are one module beside APM, logs, infra, and compliance paperwork.

Pick Checkly when the buying committee is engineering and the artifact is a Playwright repo. Pick New Relic when the committee is platform + security and the artifact is "we already pay for New Relic seats." Wider field: best synthetic monitoring tools.

TL;DR

Engine and authoring

Checkly runs modern Playwright. Suites, fixtures, and CI parity are the point:

import { test, expect } from "@playwright/test";

test("signup completes", async ({ page }) => {
  await page.goto("https://app.example.com/signup");
  await page.getByLabel("Work email").fill("synthetic@example.com");
  await page.getByRole("button", { name: "Create account" }).click();
  await expect(page.getByText("Verify your email")).toBeVisible();
});

New Relic's scripted browsers historically sit on Selenium-era Chrome/Firefox. That still monitors real journeys; it is not the same fidelity or ecosystem as Playwright Check Suites. New Relic's compensating advantage is authoring breadth: a genuine no-code Step monitor, broken-links, and certificate-oriented checks that Checkly does not center as product categories.

If non-developers must build flows without TypeScript, New Relic's Step path wins. If developers refuse to leave Playwright, Checkly wins.

Pricing and packaging

Checkly: per-run browser metering on Detect, with Communicate and Resolve as separate meters. Predictable if you forecast runs; brutal if someone sets 10-second multi-region checks.

New Relic: synthetic checks on a per-check style meter (~$0.005 / check, often discussed as ~$50/10k) stacked on Pro user seats (commonly cited around $349/user) and data ingest ($0.40–0.60/GB class). Ping checks can be free; the platform bill is rarely "synthetics only."

A team already on New Relic often "adds synthetics" inside an existing contract. A greenfield Playwright team usually finds Checkly's SKU easier to explain, until run volume explodes.

Compliance, regions, and ops

New Relic leads on compliance badges (ISO, HIPAA BAA, FedRAMP Moderate alongside SOC 2) and on the breadth of monitor types. Data region choice is sticky at signup. On-call is still a bolt-on (PagerDuty and friends).

Checkly holds SOC 2 Type II; ISO/HIPAA/FedRAMP are not the pitch. Private locations and SSO skew Enterprise. Alerting integrates cleanly; native escalation does not exist.

Who should choose which

Choose Checkly for Playwright-native MaC, suite fidelity, and a synthetics-specialist workflow.

Choose New Relic for no-code steps, compliance packaging, and synthetics that live next to APM you already operate.

Under either browser layer, monitor APIs and dependencies. DevHelm covers multi-region HTTP/DNS/SSL with flat pricing and config-as-code so a red journey becomes a specific failing endpoint. First monitor in about 60 seconds, no credit card.