Apache SkyWalking vs Honeycomb
Apache SkyWalking
skywalking.apache.org
Honeycomb
honeycomb.ioSide by side
| Figure | Apache SkyWalking | Honeycomb |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | $150/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | Yes |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | — |
| macOS | Yes | — |
| Linux | Yes | — |
| iOS | — | Yes |
| Android | — | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 3 |
| Spec score · Application Performance Monitoring | 8.4 (#7) | 8.5 (#6) |
| Spec score · Distributed Tracing Tools | 8.4 (#7) | 8.6 (#3) |
| Spec score · Runtime Monitoring Software | 8.3 (#19) | 8.5 (#15) |
| Integrations | The site identifies OpenTelemetry OTLP, Istio, Envoy, Kubernetes, Grafana, and MCP among its integrations and ecosystem projects. | The integration directory lists technologies including AWS, OpenTelemetry, Slack, MySQL, Prometheus, ServiceNow, and GitHub Actions. |
| Security | Horizon UI documents Content-Security-Policy, strict session cookies, no-store API responses, and optional login auditing. | Honeycomb's Trust Center lists SOC 2 Type 2, GDPR, and HIPAA among its certifications and compliance frameworks. |
| Support | The project directs users to GitHub discussions for questions and issues and provides a developer mailing list and Slack community contact instructions. | Honeycomb Support handles generally available product features and can receive tickets through its support portal or by email. |
| Telemetry | The platform brings traces, metrics, logs, and profiling together to help users understand services. | Honeycomb supports distributed tracing, logs, metrics, and OpenTelemetry data. |
Plans
In their own words
Apache SkyWalking
Apache SkyWalking is a free, self-hosted observability platform for cloud-native systems and AI workloads. It brings traces, metrics, logs, and profiling together to help users explore services, Kubernetes, and infrastructure through topology, telemetry, profiles, and alerts. For AI workloads, users can inspect model and MCP call latency and token rates, and review agent conversations, tool calls, and recorded file changes. The project lists agents for Java, Python, NodeJS, Go, Rust, PHP, Ruby, Nginx LUA, Kong, and client-side JavaScript. Its integrations and ecosystem include OpenTelemetry OTLP, Istio, Envoy, Kubernetes, Grafana, and MCP. BanyanDB is described as a database for ingesting, analyzing, and storing observability data. Docker installation instructions cover Linux, macOS, WSL, and Windows PowerShell. Horizon UI supports SkyWalking natively since v11 and partially for v10. Its security documentation covers Content-Security-Policy, strict session cookies, no-store API responses, and optional login auditing. Apache source releases are official artifacts, with PGP or SHA512 verification recommended; the GraalVM distribution is marked experimental.
Honeycomb
Honeycomb is an observability platform for debugging systems, application code, and databases with structured telemetry. It supports distributed tracing, logs, metrics, and OpenTelemetry data sent over gRPC, HTTP/protobuf, or HTTP/JSON. Canvas combines AI-assisted investigations with natural-language queries, interactive exploration, and shared workspaces. Agent Timeline presents LLM calls, tool invocations, handoffs, and downstream system spans in event order. BubbleUp helps investigate outliers across traces, metrics, and logs. Listed integrations include AWS, OpenTelemetry, Slack, MySQL, Prometheus, ServiceNow, and GitHub Actions. The free plan allows up to 20M events and 100M metrics data points per month, with two triggers. Pro starts at $150/mo, with allowances of up to 750M events, 3.75B metrics data points, 100 triggers, and two SLOs. Enterprise has variable volumes and custom pricing. Honeycomb describes Free for individual projects, Pro for production teams, and Enterprise for multi-team or large-scale applications.