AppSignal vs Honeycomb
AppSignal
appsignal.com
Honeycomb
honeycomb.ioSide by side
| Figure | AppSignal | Honeycomb |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $23.25/mo | $150/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | Yes |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| iOS | — | Yes |
| Android | — | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 2 | 3 |
| Spec score · Application Performance Monitoring | 8.6 (#4) | 8.5 (#6) |
| Spec score · Application Performance & Observability - Midmarket Software | 8.6 (#4) | 8.5 (#6) |
| Spec score · Runtime Monitoring Software | 8.6 (#10) | 8.5 (#15) |
| Spec score · Distributed Tracing Tools | 8.5 (#6) | 8.6 (#3) |
| Spec score · Monitoring Observability | 8.6 (#6) | 8.6 (#7) |
| Founded | 2012 | 2016 |
| Headquarters | Amsterdam, Netherlands and Austin, Texas (dual headquarters) | San Francisco, California, United States |
| Integrations | The site highlights Slack, GitHub, Jira, Linear, GitLab, and PagerDuty integrations. | The integration directory lists technologies including AWS, OpenTelemetry, Slack, MySQL, Prometheus, ServiceNow, and GitHub Actions. |
| Intended users | The free plan is described as suitable for startups, hobby projects, and side projects. | The pricing page describes Free as best for testing and individual projects, Pro for teams with a production application, and Enterprise for multi-team and large-scale applications. |
| Pricing limits | AppSignal says it does not charge overages or stop monitoring when an account crosses its plan limits. | The pricing page lists event-volume and metrics-data-point allowances for Free and Pro plans; Enterprise volume is variable. |
| Product | AppSignal is an all-in-one application monitoring product for developers, with error tracking and performance monitoring. | Honeycomb is an observability platform for debugging systems, application code, and databases using structured telemetry data. |
| Security | AppSignal states that it is ISO 27001 certified and GDPR and HIPAA compliant. | Honeycomb's Trust Center lists SOC 2 Type 2, GDPR, and HIPAA among its certifications and compliance frameworks. |
| Support | AppSignal says customers can contact a real engineer through live chat or support email. | Honeycomb Support handles generally available product features and can receive tickets through its support portal or by email. |
Plans
In their own words
AppSignal
AppSignal is a cloud application-monitoring service for developers, with error tracking, performance monitoring, logs, and tracing. Error tracking groups exceptions with backtraces and the deployment linked to each issue. Performance monitoring covers response times, throughput, slow endpoints, and slow queries. Log management provides full-text search, attribute filters, saved queries, live tail, and pattern-based alerts. Distributed tracing, transaction tracing, and log correlation are available. AppSignal lists support for Ruby, Elixir, Node.js, JavaScript, Python, Go, Java, PHP, and Rust, with integrations including Slack, GitHub, Jira, Linear, GitLab, and PagerDuty. Its MCP server lets AI assistants such as Claude, Cursor, and Zed query production errors, traces, and deploys. The free plan costs nothing and includes 30K requests, 1GB logging, five-day retention, and unlimited users, teams, applications, and dashboards. Paid access is $279 a year, billed yearly at $23.25/month, with 250K requests per month. A 30-day full-featured trial requires no credit card. AppSignal says it does not charge overages or stop monitoring when limits are crossed.
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.