Honeycomb vs SolarWinds Observability
Honeycomb
honeycomb.io
SolarWinds Observability
solarwinds.comSide by side
| Figure | Honeycomb | SolarWinds Observability |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $150/mo | $5/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | — |
| Free trial | Yes | Yes |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| Linux | — | Yes |
| iOS | Yes | — |
| Android | Yes | — |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 3 | 9 |
| Spec score · Distributed Tracing Tools | 8.6 (#3) | 7.9 (#13) |
| Spec score · Application Performance Monitoring | 8.5 (#6) | 7.8 (#24) |
| Spec score · Application Performance & Observability - Enterprise Software | 8.5 (#5) | 7.8 (#12) |
| Spec score · Observability Platforms | 8.6 (#6) | 7.8 (#19) |
| Spec score · Application Performance & Observability - Midmarket Software | 8.5 (#6) | 7.8 (#14) |
| Spec score · Monitoring Observability | 8.6 (#7) | 7.8 (#15) |
| Spec score · Runtime Monitoring Software | 8.5 (#15) | 7.8 (#27) |
| Founded | 2016 | 1999 |
| Headquarters | San Francisco, California, United States | Austin, Texas, United States |
| Telemetry | Honeycomb supports distributed tracing, logs, metrics, and OpenTelemetry data. | The SaaS offering unifies logs, metrics, traces, database queries, and user experience data. |
Plans
SolarWinds Observability
- Log Observability$5 a month
- Essentials$8 a month
- Digital Experience Observability - Real User Monitoring$10 a month
- Digital Experience Observability - Synthetic$10 a month
- Advanced$14 a month
- Network and Infrastructure Observability$15.75 a month
- Premier$17.50 a month
- Application Observability$27.50 a month
- Database Observability$70 a month
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.
SolarWinds Observability
SolarWinds Observability has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.