Zabbix vs New Relic
Zabbix is a European alternative to New Relic: same uptime monitoring use case, headquartered in Latvia and operating under GDPR by default, while New Relic is based in the United States.
By the EU Alternatives team Last updated
100% open source enterprise monitoring covering servers, networks, clouds and applications, with auto-discovery and no license fees at any scale.
- Jurisdiction
- EU / EEA
- GDPR by default
- Yes
- US CLOUD Act exposure
- No
- Open source
- Yes
- Free tier
- Yes
New Relic pioneered application performance monitoring and now sells a full observability suite with usage-based pricing and a permanent free tier. Once publicly traded, it was taken private in 2023 by Francisco Partners and TPG. Headquarters are in San Francisco, so telemetry data is governed by US law.
- Jurisdiction
- US
- GDPR by default
- Requires DPA + TIA
- US CLOUD Act exposure
- Yes
Zabbix vs New Relic at a glance
| Zabbix | New Relic | |
|---|---|---|
| Headquarters | Latvia | US |
| Data jurisdiction | EU / EEA | US law applies |
| GDPR by default | Yes | Requires DPA + transfer assessment |
| US CLOUD Act exposure | No | Yes |
| Open source | Yes | — |
| Free tier | Yes | — |
| Best for | Teams that need uptime monitoring with EU data residency | Teams already invested in the New Relic ecosystem |
Choose Zabbix if…
- You want your data to stay under EU law without extra legal paperwork
- GDPR compliance or public-sector requirements apply to you
- You want to start free and scale up later
- Open-source code and self-hosting matter to you
- You'd rather back the European tech ecosystem
Stick with New Relic if…
- You depend on integrations only available in the New Relic ecosystem
- Your organisation has no EU data-residency constraints
- Migration costs outweigh the jurisdiction benefits for now
About Zabbix
Zabbix is the 100% open source enterprise monitoring platform that watches servers, networks, clouds, applications and services from one place, with no license fees and no per-host pricing. Born in Riga in 2005, it has become one of the most widely deployed monitoring systems in the world, scaling from a single rack to hundreds of thousands of monitored devices.
Everything ships in the box: agent-based and agentless collection, SNMP and IPMI for network and hardware, auto-discovery of hosts, flexible triggers, escalations, dashboards and distributed monitoring through proxies. Because the software is fully open source, there is no community-versus-enterprise feature split; commercial support, training and turnkey services fund development.
Key benefits:
- Genuinely free with all features included, no enterprise edition upsell
- Scales massively via distributed proxies and high-availability clustering
- Auto-discovery of servers, VMs, network gear and cloud resources
- Flexible alerting with triggers, dependencies and escalation chains
- Self-hosted so metrics and topology data never leave your infrastructure
Zabbix is developed by Zabbix SIA, headquartered in Riga, Latvia, with subsidiaries in the US, Japan and Brazil reporting to the Latvian mother company. For European infrastructure teams, it is the sovereign answer to per-host SaaS monitoring bills: your monitoring stack runs where your servers run.
Ideal for sysadmins, MSPs and enterprises that want deep infrastructure monitoring under their own control instead of usage-priced US SaaS.
Why choose Zabbix over New Relic?
The decisive argument is data jurisdiction. New Relic is headquartered in US, which means personal data processed through it can be subject to non-EU legal regimes: the US CLOUD Act, FISA 702, or similar laws depending on the provider. After the 2020 Schrems II ruling, EU organisations must carry out a transfer impact assessment for every such data flow.
Zabbix removes that overhead. As a Latvia-based provider, it operates natively under GDPR, and data stays inside the EU/EEA by default. For regulated sectors such as health, public administration, and finance, that's not a nice-to-have but a requirement. For everyone else, it's concentration-risk insurance: you avoid depending on a single non-EU jurisdiction that can change the rules without warning.