Azure Application Insights vs Honeycomb
Azure Application Insights
azure.microsoft.com
Honeycomb
honeycomb.ioSide by side
| Figure | Azure Application Insights | Honeycomb |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | — | $150/mo |
| Free plan | — | Yes |
| Free trial | — | Yes |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | — |
| Linux | Yes | — |
| iOS | Yes | Yes |
| Android | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 3 |
| Spec score · Application Performance Monitoring | 8.4 (#8) | 8.5 (#6) |
| Spec score · Runtime Monitoring Software | 8.4 (#16) | 8.5 (#15) |
| Founded | 1975 | 2016 |
| Headquarters | Redmond, Washington, United States | San Francisco, California, United States |
| Integrations | Documented integrations include Azure SDK tracing, Cosmos DB SDK observability, .NET OpenTelemetry, Azure Container Apps, Azure Data Explorer, and Azure AI Foundry. | The integration directory lists technologies including AWS, OpenTelemetry, Slack, MySQL, Prometheus, ServiceNow, and GitHub Actions. |
| Pricing model | Azure Monitor pricing lists usage-based ingestion and other metered features; its pricing page displays some rates as "$-" rather than a numeric price. | The pricing page lists unlimited seats and unlimited querying. |
| Security | Application Insights supports TLS 1.2 and 1.3, and Microsoft Entra authentication can restrict telemetry ingestion to authenticated identities. | Honeycomb's Trust Center lists SOC 2 Type 2, GDPR, and HIPAA among its certifications and compliance frameworks. |
| Support | Microsoft recommends its Azure Monitor OpenTelemetry Distro for new projects and describes it as supported by Microsoft. | Honeycomb Support handles generally available product features and can receive tickets through its support portal or by email. |
Plans
Azure Application Insights
- Pay-as-you-go (Azure Monitor Logs)Price not published
In their own words
Azure Application Insights
Azure Application Insights is an Azure Monitor service for collecting and analyzing application telemetry. It combines alerts, metrics, logs, workbooks, Grafana dashboards, and investigation tools such as application maps, live metrics, transaction search, availability monitoring, failure analysis, and performance views. Usage analytics cover users, sessions, events, funnels, flows, and cohorts. For.NET applications, diagnostics include profiling and a snapshot debugger for exceptions. Microsoft recommends the Azure Monitor OpenTelemetry Distro for most code-based server-side scenarios; browser telemetry uses the Application Insights JavaScript SDK. Setup paths cover web apps, virtual machines, JavaScript apps, Azure Functions, Kubernetes, and AI agents. Telemetry is stored in a Log Analytics workspace, and the service can work with applications hosted outside Azure. A daily ingestion cap can stop excess collection until the next UTC day, while sampling can reduce volume. The pricing page lists 90 days of no-charge retention, with longer retention charged by retained data volume. Ingestion is usage-based, with the first 5 GB per month per billing account free.
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.