Grafana Cloud Traces vs Honeycomb
Grafana Cloud Traces
grafana.com
Honeycomb
honeycomb.ioSide by side
| Figure | Grafana Cloud Traces | Honeycomb |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | $150/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | Yes |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| iOS | — | Yes |
| Android | — | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 3 | 3 |
| Spec score · Distributed Tracing Tools | 7.8 (#15) | 8.6 (#3) |
| Intended users | Grafana describes Cloud Traces as helping teams understand request flows and troubleshoot performance issues at scale. | 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. |
| Support | The Free tier includes community support, Pro includes 8×5 email support, and Enterprise offers premium support. | Honeycomb Support handles generally available product features and can receive tickets through its support portal or by email. |
Plans
Grafana Cloud Traces
- FreeFree
- EnterprisePriced on request
- ProPrice not published
In their own words
Grafana Cloud Traces
Grafana Cloud Traces has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.
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.