New Relic vs. Honeycomb.io: A data-backed comparison
Explore New Relic and Honeycomb.io’s features, pricing, adoption trends, and ideal use cases to help you determine which tool best fits your team.
New Relic vs. Honeycomb.io at a glance
New Relic is trusted by organizations seeking deep visibility and customizable dashboards. Honeycomb.io focuses on high-cardinality event data, distributed tracing, and rapid root cause analysis, making it popular among engineering teams solving complex, modern production issues.
New Relic stands out for full-stack visibility and analytics, while Honeycomb.io is known for advanced debugging and cloud-native environments.
Metrics | New Relic | Honeycomb |
|---|---|---|
Relative cost | - | - |
Adoption trend | 8% QoQ adoption growth | -38% QoQ adoption growth |
Primary user segment | 66% of users are micro & SMB | 83% of users are micro & SMB |
Best for | Small and medium-sized businesses that need comprehensive application performance monitoring without the complexity of enterprise-level observability platforms. | Micro businesses that need advanced observability and debugging tools without the complexity of enterprise-level monitoring systems. |
New Relic overview
New Relic is a comprehensive observability platform that delivers unified monitoring across infrastructure, applications, and logs, providing deep analytics and distributed tracing for cloud and on-prem environments. It suits organizations that need broad observability, customizable dashboards, and powerful alerting in one platform.
New Relic key features
Features | Description |
|---|---|
Full-stack monitoring | Monitors applications, infrastructure, and user experience in one platform. |
Application performance monitoring | Tracks code-level performance and error rates. |
Distributed tracing | Visualizes requests and dependencies across microservices. |
Log management | Centralizes and analyzes logs in real time. |
Proactive alerting and AI | Provides automated, intelligent incident response. |
Honeycomb.io overview
Honeycomb.io is a next-generation observability platform designed for exploring high-cardinality event data and rapid debugging. It offers distributed tracing, real-time analysis, and anomaly detection, enabling teams to quickly pinpoint issues and improve system reliability. It’s well-suited for engineering teams operating distributed systems who need to analyze unpredictable production incidents and optimize performance.
Honeycomb.io key features
Features | Description |
|---|---|
High-cardinality querying | Enables real-time, granular queries across millions of data points. |
Real-time observability | Instantly analyzes telemetry across distributed systems. |
Distributed tracing | Visualizes end-to-end requests and system dependencies. |
BubbleUp analytics | Surfaces key patterns and outliers automatically. |
Team collaboration | Shares insights and queries for collective problem-solving. |
Pros and cons
Tool | Pros | Cons |
|---|---|---|
New Relic |
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Honeycomb |
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Which tool is better?
New Relic is better for teams seeking end-to-end observability and analytics across environments. Honeycomb.io is the right choice for teams that prioritize deep debugging, high-cardinality data, and solving unknown production issues.
When New Relic is the better choice
- Your team needs unified monitoring across apps, infrastructure, and logs.
- Your team needs customizable dashboards and advanced analytics.
- Your team needs proactive alerting and automation for performance issues.
- Your team needs a scalable, managed observability platform.
When Honeycomb.io is the better choice
- Your team needs high-cardinality event analysis and rapid root cause investigation.
- Your team needs to explore and debug in distributed systems.
- Your team needs advanced distributed tracing and observability for microservices.
- Your team needs fast, flexible data exploration without pre-aggregation.