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Tracing and event-based observability · by Hound Technology, Inc. (Honeycomb)

Honeycomb

OpenTelemetry-native observability built on high-cardinality events and distributed tracing, priced by event volume with unlimited users and a free 20M-event plan.

Visit honeycomb.io ↗ Alternatives Free tier EU region
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Overview

Honeycomb is built around wide events: each span or log line can carry any number of fields, such as user ID, build ID or feature flag, and you can group and filter by any of them without pre-defining metrics. That makes it strong for debugging distributed systems where the question changes during an incident.

BubbleUp compares a slow or failing slice of traffic with the baseline and shows which attributes differ. SLOs and triggers handle alerting, and newer features cover LLM and agent tracing, an AI investigation canvas and an MCP server for coding agents.

Pricing is by event volume: Free covers 20 million events a month, Pro starts at $150 for 50 million, and Enterprise begins at 10 billion events a year. Users and queries are unlimited on all plans, so costs depend on how much telemetry you send and how well you sample, not team size.

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Pricing and plans

checked 28 Sept 2026

Free tier

Up to 20M events and 100M metric data points a month, 2 triggers, distributed tracing, BubbleUp, OpenTelemetry support and MCP access, free forever.

Plan Price What you get
Free $0 20M events and 100M metric data points a month, 2 triggers
Pro From $150/mo From 50M events (up to 750M), 100 triggers, 2 SLOs, SSO, support
Enterprise Custom From 10B events a year, 300 triggers, 100 SLOs, service map, private cloud option

Pro starts at $150 per 50M events and 250M metric data points, scaling up to 750M events. From July 1, 2026 Pro pricing moved to four tiers at $3.00 per million events (legacy plans: $1.30) and bundles Time Series Metrics and AI features; legacy Pro customers have a grace period to December 31, 2026. Telemetry pipeline processing starts at $0.10/GB. Seats and queries are unlimited on every plan. Data retention was not stated on the pricing page and is left out. Data can be stored in the US (AWS us-east-1) or EU (Ireland) region, chosen at signup. Compliance certifications were not listed on the pages read.

Source: www.honeycomb.io/pricing · prices as published, excluding tax.

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What it does

High-cardinality queries
Group and filter by any event field, with unlimited custom fields per event.
Distributed tracing
Trace waterfalls built from OpenTelemetry data, available on every plan.
BubbleUp
Highlights which attributes differ between a selected outlier set and normal traffic.
SLOs and triggers
2 triggers on Free, 100 triggers and 2 SLOs on Pro, 100+ SLOs on Enterprise.
Canvas and MCP
AI investigation workspace and an MCP server that gives coding agents production context.
Agent Timeline
Traces multi-step LLM and agent workflows with token cost and latency per model.
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Strengths and limitations

Strengths

  • Fast, flexible queries on high-cardinality data without pre-aggregation.
  • Unlimited users and queries on every plan.
  • Free plan with 20 million events a month is enough for real services.
  • Built on OpenTelemetry, so instrumentation is portable.

Limitations

  • Pro starts at $150 a month, a big step up from free.
  • SLOs are limited to 2 on Pro; the service map is Enterprise only.
  • Free plan includes only 2 triggers.
  • Not an uptime, status page or classic log-search tool.
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Who it suits

Good for

  • Teams running microservices or distributed systems
  • Engineers debugging with traces and wide events
  • Teams tracing LLM and agent workflows

Look elsewhere if

  • Simple uptime monitoring or status pages
  • Infrastructure metrics dashboards in the Prometheus style
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Pricing history

  • Honeycomb reprices Pro plan tiers

    Effective 2026-07-01: new Pro tiers bundle Time Series Metrics and AI features at $3.00 per million events (legacy $1.30), with four tiers up to 750M events; legacy customers keep their plan until 2026-12-31. Source ↗

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Alternatives to Honeycomb

Tool From Free option Stages
Amazon CloudWatch AWS-native metrics, logs, alarms and tracing
Usage-based Free tier
BugSnag Error and stability monitoring for mobile and web
$20/mo Free tier
Checkly Synthetic and uptime monitoring as code
$24/mo Free tier
Coroot Self-hosted eBPF observability
$1/mo Free tier
Grafana Cloud Hosted metrics, logs, traces and dashboards
$19/mo Free tier
New Relic Full-stack observability platform
$10/mo Free tier

All monitoring, uptime and error tracking →

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Questions

Is Honeycomb free?

Yes, the Free plan allows up to 20 million events and 100 million metric data points a month with no time limit.

How much does Honeycomb Pro cost?

Pro starts at $150 a month for 50 million events and scales up to 750 million events.

Does Honeycomb charge per user?

No, all plans include unlimited seats and unlimited querying.

Does Honeycomb support OpenTelemetry?

Yes, it is OpenTelemetry-native and accepts OTLP data directly.

Sources read for this page