Honeycomb Alternatives: Six Options Compared for Traces, Events, and Logs
Prices and facts checked on vendor pages on Nov 8, 2026.
Honeycomb is built around traces and wide events, priced by how many events you send rather than by hosts or users. Teams look for alternatives when event volume outgrows a plan, when they want logs and infrastructure monitoring under one roof, or when they prefer per-GB pricing. This page compares six options. Sazabi wrote it and is one of the six, and it is a log-first tool, so it fits a different job than Honeycomb does.
What Honeycomb Charges, For Reference
Honeycomb has Free, Pro, and Enterprise plans. Free allows up to 20M events and 100M metric data points per month. Pro is listed as starting at $150 per month for 50M events, up to 750M, with up to 3.75B data points. Enterprise plans start with a base allowance of 10 billion events per year. The pricing page lists unlimited seats, unlimited querying, and a telemetry pipeline starting at $0.10 per GB.
The unit that matters is the event. Honeycomb counts each span in a trace as one event, and each metric observation as a data point. Honeycomb does not bill time series metrics by unique series. Events and logs have a fixed 60-day retention, and time-series metrics keep 13 months by default. On Free and Pro, a second consecutive month over the limit starts a 10-day countdown before throttling. Enterprise is exempt from throttling. See Honeycomb Pricing Explained and Sazabi vs Honeycomb.
Six Honeycomb Alternatives At A Glance
How To Choose
- Is tracing your main job? Honeycomb is built for it. If traces are one signal among several, a broader platform may cost less to run.
- Can you convert events to GB? A per-GB tool needs your average span size. Measure it before comparing quotes.
- Do you need logs and infrastructure too? Honeycomb lists logs and metrics, but several tools here add host monitoring, error tracking, or incident response.
- Do you need Private Cloud or a data location? Honeycomb offers a US or EU data location and a Private Cloud option that runs on AWS. Check what each alternative lists.
Datadog
Datadog's APM is $31 per APM host per month on annual billing ($36 month-to-month). Trace ingestion is $0.10 per GB, and indexed spans are a separate meter: per million spans, $1.27 with 7-day retention, $1.70 with 15 days, and $2.50 with 30 days on annual billing. Continuous Profiler is $19 per profiled host and Universal Service Monitoring is $9 per infrastructure host, both annual. See Sazabi vs Datadog and Datadog Alternatives.
Pick it when you want traces tied to hosts, containers, and logs in one vendor. Skip it when you want one meter, since hosts, ingested GB, and indexed spans are billed separately.
Grafana Cloud
Grafana Cloud's tracing backend is a managed service with a Free plan of 50 GB ingested per month and 14-day retention. Pro starts at $19 per month and keeps traces 30 days, with rates starting at $0.05 per GB processed, $0.40 per GB written, and $0.10 per GB retained. Application Observability is listed at $0.025 per host hour ($18 per host). Grafana also lists agent-powered investigations that form hypotheses across metrics, logs, traces, and profiles, with no per-seat or per-investigation fee. See Sazabi vs Grafana and Grafana Alternatives.
Pick it when you want an open ecosystem and already run Grafana. Skip it when you want a trace workflow in one product without assembling parts.
SigNoz
SigNoz lists APM and distributed tracing features in all editions, including out-of-the-box APM metrics, dashboards and alerts based on traces, third-party API monitoring, and advanced visualization for very large traces of more than 10,000 spans. Traces are $0.30 per GB with 15-day retention on Cloud. Teams starts at $49 per month with unlimited teammates and no host-based pricing. See Sazabi vs SigNoz.
Pick it when you want OpenTelemetry-native tracing with a self-hosted fallback. Skip it when you need 60 days of trace retention by default, as Honeycomb has.
Elastic
Elastic Observability Serverless prices traces together with logs under one ingest rate. Logs Essentials shows as low as $0.07 per GB ingested, and Complete shows as low as $0.09. Complete adds service level objectives and machine learning. Retention is $0.017 or $0.019 per GB per month, depending on the tier. Elastic lists Agent Builder as an add-on at as low as $0.025 per execution after 10,000 free. See Sazabi vs Elastic and Elastic Alternatives.
Pick it when you want traces and logs in a platform that also handles search workloads. Skip it when you want an event-count price that ignores payload size.
New Relic
New Relic's free tier includes 100 GB of ingest, one full platform user, and APM with distributed tracing among 50+ capabilities. Beyond the free allowance, data ingest is $0.40 per GB. Full platform users cost from $10 for the first Standard user, and Pro lists $349 per user on annual commitments. The page says hosts, containers, and Fargate tasks are not billed separately. See Sazabi vs New Relic and New Relic Alternatives.
Pick it when you want tracing plus the rest of the platform with a usable free tier. Skip it when your team is large and most people need full platform access.
Sazabi
Sazabi is AI-native observability and security. Honeycomb is where you explore request data; Sazabi is where logs are watched for problems. It ingests OpenTelemetry traces over OTLP and stores each span as a searchable record with its trace and span IDs, name, status, duration, and attributes. Spans with an error status become errors, and exceptions recorded on a span become their own error records with the stack trace. Because every record carries trace context, the agent can line up a trace with the logs from the same request while it investigates an issue.
Plans per 30-day cycle: Hobby $50, Startup $200, Growth $1,000, each with 200 GB logs ingested, 50 GB scanned, and 20 issues, then $0.10 per GB for ingest and scans and $4 per issue. For illustration, assume 100M spans a month at 1 KB each, about 100 GB, and that spans count toward logs ingested. That fits inside the 200 GB Hobby allowance at $50. The same volume on SigNoz is $0.30 per GB, or $30, which sits under the $49 monthly minimum. Honeycomb's page prices Pro as starting at $150 for 50M events, and does not list a price at 100M, so ask Honeycomb for that quote. See Sazabi pricing.
Pick it when traces are a supporting signal and you want issues, root cause, and alerts from your logs. Skip it when you need BubbleUp-style exploration of high-cardinality request data, SLO reporting, or service maps, which Honeycomb lists.
Try An Alternative Without Dropping Honeycomb
Honeycomb lists OpenTelemetry support, so most teams already export OTLP. Add Sazabi as another destination with an otlphttp exporter on your Collector, wired into the logs and traces pipelines, or set OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_TRACES_ENDPOINT to your Sazabi intake URL. Collector-based forwarding does not store metrics, so use Sazabi's OpenTelemetry metrics source if you want those. See OpenTelemetry on Sazabi.
Sazabi also has a Honeycomb MCP connector. Its agent can list environments, datasets, and columns, run queries, view boards, triggers, and SLOs, and surface trace and event context during an investigation. Your Honeycomb user needs Read access under Model Context Protocol, and the mcp:write scope is needed only for creating or updating boards and triggers. See the Honeycomb integration.
Frequently Asked Questions
How does Honeycomb count usage compared with per-GB tools?
Honeycomb counts events, and each span in a trace counts as one event, so a trace with 150 spans is 150 events. Datadog, SigNoz, Grafana Cloud, Elastic, and New Relic bill traces by GB ingested, so you need an average span size to compare the two.
Can I send the same OpenTelemetry traces to Honeycomb and Sazabi?
Yes. Add Sazabi as another OTLP/HTTP exporter on your OpenTelemetry Collector, or set the OTLP traces endpoint to your Sazabi intake URL. Your Honeycomb exporter can stay in place while you compare.
Is Sazabi a Honeycomb replacement for tracing?
Not for interactive trace exploration. Sazabi stores spans as searchable records and correlates them with logs, but its public pages do not list features such as BubbleUp or service maps. Keep Honeycomb if exploring request data is your main workflow.
What happens if I go over my Honeycomb event limit?
On Free and Pro, Honeycomb emails you after the first month over. After a second consecutive month it warns you and gives 10 days to correct it before it starts throttling. Enterprise plans are exempt from throttling.
Sources
- Honeycomb Free, Pro and Enterprise limits, Pro starting price, unlimited seats, telemetry pipeline rate (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Event and data point definitions, overage and throttling process, burst protection, retention by data type (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Honeycomb US and EU data locations and GDPR statement (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Honeycomb Private Cloud deployment option and AWS availability (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Datadog APM host, trace ingestion, indexed span and profiler list prices (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Grafana Cloud trace rates and retention, Application Observability host-hour price, investigations (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- SigNoz trace rate and retention, APM and tracing features, Community Edition (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Elastic serverless rates for traces, tier contents, add-on prices (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- New Relic free tier, data ingest rate, APM with distributed tracing, user pricing (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Sazabi plans, included usage, overage rates, retention (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- How Sazabi ingests OpenTelemetry traces and stores spans as records (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Adding Sazabi as an extra OTLP exporter on an OpenTelemetry Collector (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Sazabi MCP connector for Honeycomb, what the agent can do, prerequisites (accessed Nov 8, 2026)