Honeycomb.io review: A data-backed look
Explore Honeycomb.io’s adoption trends, market share, category benchmarks, and use cases to determine if it’s the right observability platform for your business.
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Honeycomb.io overview
Honeycomb.io is a modern observability platform designed to help engineering teams quickly debug, analyze, and optimize complex systems. Its event-based approach delivers high-cardinality, real-time insights that go beyond traditional metrics, logs, and traces.
Honeycomb.io is well-suited for organizations operating distributed architectures that need fast, in-depth query capabilities for pinpointing and resolving issues.
How much do businesses spend on Honeycomb.io?
The chart below illustrates average spending on Honeycomb.io across different business sizes.
Mid-market and enterprise businesses demonstrate the highest initial spending on Honeycomb, with quarterly expenditure showing a steep decline throughout the measured period.
Small and medium-sized businesses maintain moderate spending levels with gradual decreases over time. Micro businesses show relatively stable spending patterns with modest fluctuations and the smallest overall decline.
Who is Honeycomb.io best for?
The chart below breaks down Honeycomb.io’s user base by industry and company size.
Micro businesses represent the largest portion of Honeycomb.io's user base, making up the dominant segment of platform adoption.
Small and medium-sized companies constitute a significant portion of users, while mid-market and enterprise businesses represent the smallest segment.
Honeycomb.io key features
High-cardinality querying
- What it does: Allows users to explore millions of unique fields and values in real time.
- Key benefit: Helps engineering teams quickly isolate anomalies and pinpoint outliers.
Real-time observability
- What it does: Streams and analyzes telemetry data instantly across distributed systems.
- Key benefit: Delivers immediate feedback for faster incident response and debugging.
Distributed tracing
- What it does: Visualizes end-to-end request flows across microservices and infrastructure.
- Key benefit: Makes it easier to understand dependencies and latency sources.
BubbleUp analytics
- What it does: Automatically surfaces patterns and differences between normal and problematic traffic.
- Key benefit: Accelerates root-cause analysis without manual data exploration.
Team collaboration
- What it does: Shares queries, boards, and findings among team members for faster problem-solving.
- Key benefit: Improves incident response with shared context and visibility.
Honeycomb.io pricing
Plan | Price | Key features | Ideal for |
|---|---|---|---|
Free | $0/mo | Up to 20 million events/month, unlimited users, basic boards, OpenTelemetry support. | Small teams, open-source projects, testing. |
Pro | $130/mo | 100M to 1.5B events/month options, 60-day retention, 100+ triggers, SSO, customer success team, next business day support | Growing teams needing advanced debugging. |
Enterprise | Custom | Scales to any size, 60-day retention (extensions available), 300 triggers, advanced security, 24/7 support, onboarding accelerator | Large organizations with strict requirements. |
Honeycomb.io pros & cons
Honeycomb.io is a good fit if:
- Your team needs rapid debugging for complex, distributed systems.
- Your team needs high-cardinality querying for real-time troubleshooting.
- Your team needs in-depth distributed tracing and performance analysis.
- Your team needs collaborative incident investigation.
Consider alternatives if:
- Your team needs a traditional monitoring solution with simple dashboards.
- Your team needs extensive on-premise deployment options.
- Your team needs low-cost solutions for basic infrastructure monitoring.
- Your team needs built-in alerting and reporting for legacy systems.