Honeycomb vs Thanos
Honeycomb
honeycomb.ioThanos
thanos.ioSide by side
| Figure | Honeycomb | Thanos |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $150/mo | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | — |
| Linux | — | Yes |
| iOS | Yes | — |
| Android | Yes | — |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 3 | 1 |
| Spec score · Kubernetes Monitoring | 8.6 (#8) | 7.2 (#40) |
| Integrations | The integration directory lists technologies including AWS, OpenTelemetry, Slack, MySQL, Prometheus, ServiceNow, and GitHub Actions. | The integrations documentation describes StoreAPI connections, including Geras for OpenTSDB and a proxy for Prometheus remote read. |
| Security | Honeycomb's Trust Center lists SOC 2 Type 2, GDPR, and HIPAA among its certifications and compliance frameworks. | Thanos uses TLS by default for object storage communication, but its security policy says local metrics are not encrypted by Thanos and its HTTP APIs lack authorization or TLS 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.