Checkmk vs Honeycomb
Checkmk
checkmk.com
Honeycomb
honeycomb.ioSide by side
| Figure | Checkmk | Honeycomb |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $275/mo | $150/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | Yes |
| Open source | Yes | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | — |
| macOS | Yes | — |
| Linux | Yes | — |
| iOS | Yes | Yes |
| Android | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 5 | 3 |
| Spec score · Kubernetes Monitoring | 9.4 (#1) | 8.6 (#8) |
| Spec score · Monitoring Observability | 9.4 (#1) | 8.6 (#7) |
| Founded | 2007 | 2016 |
| Headquarters | Munich, Germany | San Francisco, California, United States |
| Integrations | Checkmk advertises more than 2,000 built-in integrations covering hardware, networks, applications, operating systems and cloud or container platforms. | The integration directory lists technologies including AWS, OpenTelemetry, Slack, MySQL, Prometheus, ServiceNow, and GitHub Actions. |
| Support | The Pro plan includes professional support for 8h x 5d, while Ultimate includes 10h x 5d and can be upgraded to 24h x 5d. | Honeycomb Support handles generally available product features and can receive tickets through its support portal or by email. |
Plans
Checkmk
- CommunityFree
- Synthetic MonitoringFree
- Pro$275 a month
- Cloud$290 a month
- Ultimate$400 a month
In their own words
Checkmk
Checkmk monitors cloud, hybrid, and data center infrastructure, including containers and networks. For web, mail, and database servers, it combines more than 2,000 smart checks with automatic discovery and network mapping. Monitoring can use native agents for Windows, Linux, and other systems, agentless SNMP and TCP/UDP checks, or API-based checks over HTTP/XML, SSH, or TELNET. Cloud coverage includes AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform, with automatic component detection and Quick Setup. One instance can monitor thousands of servers, while distributed monitoring supports horizontal scaling. Community includes more than 2,000 integrations and is intended for smaller environments, scaling to approximately 100 hosts. The software can run on customer hardware or virtualized infrastructure, with Linux distribution packages, Docker, and a Virtual Appliance. The Community plan is free forever and includes community support. The pricing note lists paid plans from €190/mo (annual) and a 30-day trial. Other listed plan prices use USD: Pro is $275 a month, Cloud is $290 a month, and Ultimate is $400 a month. Platforms include API, Linux, macOS, self-hosted, web, and Windows.
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.