Choosing the right observability platform
The observability market has evolved. Have your tools?
Traditional APM and monitoring solutions were built for yesterday’s systems: simple apps, monoliths, and predictable infrastructure. But today’s engineering teams are operating in a different world—one built on AI, microservices, distributed systems, and constant change.
The observability landscape
There are cheaper tools. There are traditional APM tools. And then there’s Honeycomb—the powerful platform that introduced observability to the world.
Traditional APM suites
They’re useful but limited, only telling you about issues after they happen. Okay for breadth. Not great for depth.
Low-cost APM suites
What you save in cents you lose in insights, features, and support. If you do delve into the data, the costs quickly rack up.
Honeycomb observability
The pioneers in observability. Built for limitless exploration, rapid debugging, and stress-free deployments.
How Honeycomb compares
Wondering if we’re right for you? Let’s get into the details. Take a look at some of the key differences between Honeycomb, traditional APM tools, and low-cost alternatives.
 |  |  |
|---|---|---|
| Analysis Power | ||
Fast, flexible analysis across any dimension or depth. | Pre-aggregated data siloed in different tools limits flexibility and splits insights. | Cardinality and analysis limits lead to low insights when you need them. |
| Scalability | ||
Performance scales effortlessly regardless of data volume, and at an affordable cost. | Cost does not scale with enterprise as multi-tool billing grows out of control. | Low-cost backend performance may degrade at enterprise scale. |
| Data Compatibility | ||
Optimized for analyzing OpenTelemetry, inheriting all of its ecosystem integrations. | Large ecosystems, using proprietary agents. | Works with a range of open source data types. |
| Collaboration | ||
Unified workflows with full team visibility and unlimited user seats. | Tool sprawl splits source of truth and limits collaborative debugging. | Barebones features and lack of customer support may hinder adoption. |
| Customer Support + Enablement | ||
Focused guidance from observability experts and OpenTelemetry contributors. | Large support systems and billed hours for additional expertise. | Small teams limited to basic/chat support. |
Why engineering teams choose Honeycomb
Honeycomb’s built for engineers, by engineers. You don’t need to trade off value, speed, or depth of analysis—with Honeycomb, you get it all. Here are just four reasons we’re the modern observability solution for engineering teams.
Explore without limits
Pre-built dashboards assume you already know the right questions to ask. Honeycomb lets you explore your telemetry data freely—slicing, filtering, and asking new questions on the fly, without rigid pre-aggregation or guesswork.
Real-time understanding
Ingest data and start querying it within seconds. Honeycomb helps you spot anomalies, debug incidents, and resolve issues while they’re still happening—not minutes or hours later.
Optimized for insight & efficiency
Honeycomb delivers enterprise-grade power without enterprise bloat. You get the ability to store rich, high-cardinality data and query it fast—without runaway costs or tradeoffs in performance.
Built for every engineer
Honeycomb isn’t just for observability experts or SREs. With intuitive tools like Query Assistant, visual UI, and OpenTelemetry support, any engineer—from frontend to infra to ML—can gain deep understanding and take action quickly.
With Honeycomb, we started using tracing to bring events together. We can aggregate logs with their corresponding events—tracking details like datacenter, availability zone, region, version, timestamp, node, persona, and more—all in one place. It gives us everything we need, quickly and efficiently, which is essential for our development needs.
Harry Morgan
Senior DevOps Engineer, Birdie
What our customers say
After years in engineering feeling like I was missing critical insights, with our switch to Honeycomb, suddenly, it’s like I have sight for the first time in my career.
Pawel Malon
Principal Software Engineer, Phorest
We rely on Honeycomb to provide the world-class scale and resilience LaunchDarkly customers expect.
Edith Harbaugh
Co-founder and CEO, LaunchDarkly
We’re able to bring a different mentality in the way we run and manage our production systems. We were able to really help our engineering teams and change the culture.
Rich Anakor
Chief Solutions Architect, Vanguard
People ask, ‘Where’s Honeycomb in the new architecture?’ The answer is it’s everywhere. It’s built in.
Nick Herring
Technical Director of Infrastructure, CCP Games
We have predictable pricing that lets us do away with the legacy approach of sampling logs to preserve budget. Honeycomb’s event-based pricing empowers us to see every request from every service that comes through.
Michael Garski
Director of Platform Engineering, Fender
