Honeycomb vs Skylight
Honeycomb
honeycomb.ioSkylight
skylight.ioSide by side
| Figure | Honeycomb | Skylight |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $150/mo | $20/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | Yes |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | — | Yes |
| Linux | — | Yes |
| iOS | Yes | — |
| Android | Yes | — |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | — |
| Plans published | 3 | 3 |
| Spec score · Application Performance Monitoring | 8.5 (#6) | 7.8 (#23) |
| Product | Honeycomb is an observability platform for debugging systems, application code, and databases using structured telemetry data. | Skylight is a smart profiler for Ruby and Rails applications that turns performance data into actionable insights. |
| Support | Honeycomb Support handles generally available product features and can receive tickets through its support portal or by email. | Skylight provides documentation for setup, instrumentation, performance tips, background jobs, and troubleshooting, and directs users with further questions to contact support. |
Plans
In their own words
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.
Skylight
Skylight is a cloud profiler for Ruby and Rails applications, available through API, Linux, macOS, and web platforms. It ranks endpoints by “agony,” combining popularity with response time, and plots deployments against performance so teams can relate code changes to results. Supported Ruby frameworks include Rails, Sinatra, and Grape. Skylight analyzes Sidekiq, DelayedJob, and ActiveJob background queues, and can flag allocation-heavy code and repeated queries. Endpoint timelines present aggregated, sanitized SQL queries. GraphQL queries are grouped by name in the dashboard and endpoint event sequences. A weekly report identifies improved endpoints, slowdown warnings, and endpoints that declined over six weeks. Each account includes 100,000 free traces per month. Paid tiers start at $20 a month and adjust to monthly trace volume across apps. A 30-day trial is available without a credit card. Open-source apps may apply for free public reporting. Communications are encrypted, and access to customer information is limited to selected personnel and contractors.