New Relic vs Honeycomb: Per-GB Platform Pricing Against Per-Event Tracing
Prices and facts checked on vendor pages on Nov 8, 2026.
New Relic is a broad platform: agents for APM, infrastructure, browser, mobile, and logs, priced by gigabytes and by user seat. Honeycomb is a tracing-first tool that stores wide events and charges for event count, with unlimited seats. The cleanest split is breadth against exploration, and the second question is whether you would rather count bytes or spans.
The Short Answer
Pick New Relic when you want agents and curated views across hosts, services, browsers, and mobile apps, and your team is small enough that per-user pricing stays modest. Pick Honeycomb when engineers query rich trace and event data all day, many people need access, and you are willing to control cost by sampling. They answer different questions, so a few teams keep Honeycomb for production debugging next to New Relic for coverage.
New Relic vs Honeycomb at a Glance
How New Relic Charges
List prices below were checked on November 8, 2026 at newrelic.com/pricing. The free tier gives you 100 GB of ingest a month, one full platform user, and unlimited basic users. After that, the original data option is $0.40 per GB and Data Plus is $0.60 per GB, with Data Plus adding up to 90 days of retention. Synthetic checks beyond the included amount are $0.005 each.
Seats work in tiers. A basic user is free and sees dashboards and queries, a core user is $49 and gets the logs UI and the errors inbox, and a full platform user opens the curated APM, infrastructure, and browser views. Standard charges $10 for the first full user and $99 for each of up to four more. Pro charges $349 per full user on an annual commitment, or $418.80 month to month. New Relic also lists an optional compute-based model with no user licenses.
The AI agent sits behind a separate meter. New Relic's docs say Autopilot needs Pro or Enterprise plus the Advanced Compute add-on, or a legacy compute plan.
How Honeycomb Charges
Honeycomb's pricing page lists Free at up to 20M events and 100M metric data points per month, Pro from $150 per month for 50M events and up to 750M, and Enterprise on custom terms with volume discounts. Honeycomb's docs put Pro's per-event rate at $3.00 per million events as of July 1, 2026, up from $1.30 on legacy plans, with a grace period for legacy Pro teams that ends December 31, 2026.
An event is one unit of work, and each span in a trace counts as one, so a 150-span trace is 150 events. Events you sample before sending do not count. On Free and Pro, a second consecutive month over the limit starts a 10-day warning, and after that Honeycomb accepts one in every ten events until volume falls back under the daily target. Enterprise is exempt from throttling. If a day passes twice the daily target, burst protection does not count the excess against your limit, up to three times a month.
Worked example. Assume 4M requests a month, 12 spans each, no sampling: 4M x 12 = 48M events, which sits inside the 50M entry tier at $150 per month, and seats are unlimited. For New Relic the same traffic is a function of event size, which you have to measure. At an assumed 1 KB per span, 48M spans is 48 GB, inside the free 100 GB, so data costs $0. At an assumed 5 KB per span it is 240 GB, so 140 GB x $0.40 = $56. Add five Standard full platform users at $10 + 4 x $99 = $406, and the monthly New Relic total is $406 to $462 against Honeycomb's $150. Change the span size or the headcount and the order can flip.
Where They Differ in Practice
What an engineer does all day. Honeycomb is built to query events with arbitrary fields and surface outliers, and its logs are stored as the same kind of event as spans. When your app exports OpenTelemetry logs and traces together, Honeycomb ties each log line to its trace automatically. New Relic starts from entities such as services, hosts, and browser apps, and its log product adds no-code parsing, AI log alert summaries, and Federated Logs for querying without moving data.
Instrumentation. New Relic offers its own agents, automatic Kubernetes instrumentation, and 800+ integrations, and also accepts OpenTelemetry through an OTLP endpoint. Honeycomb is built around OpenTelemetry and accepts OTLP over gRPC, HTTP/protobuf, and HTTP/JSON for traces, logs, and metrics.
AI investigation. Honeycomb's Canvas can start investigating a trigger, SLO burn alert, or anomaly the moment it fires, for up to 25 of each, once Honeycomb Intelligence is enabled. Honeycomb states it does not use your telemetry to train foundation models. New Relic's Autopilot triages alerts and analyzes incidents from Slack and is limited to 100 requests per hour per organization.
Retention and where data lives. Honeycomb's fixed 60 days is longer than New Relic's 30-day log default, but New Relic's live archives can stretch logs to seven years at a separate storage and query cost. Honeycomb Private Cloud runs on AWS in your account.
When to Pick New Relic
- You want one vendor across infrastructure, APM, browser, mobile, logs, and synthetic checks.
- Few people need the full interface, so $49 core and $0 basic seats keep the seat bill small.
- Your logs need long archives for audits, up to seven years.
- Your data is mostly logs and metrics at modest volume, and the free 100 GB covers a lot of it.
When to Pick Honeycomb
- Your system is trace-heavy and you want to slice high-cardinality fields without pre-aggregating.
- Everyone from developers to support needs to query, and unlimited seats matter.
- You can sample, since sampled events do not count against your limit.
- You need the vendor's software inside your own AWS account.
Where Sazabi Fits
Sazabi is AI-native observability and security that runs beside both tools. If an OpenTelemetry Collector already exports to New Relic or Honeycomb, you can add one more OTLP exporter for logs and traces and compare the results on real traffic. The Sazabi agent investigates in Slack and opens issues. Sazabi does not offer synthetic checks, so keep your synthetic monitoring tool for those.
Read Sazabi vs New Relic and Sazabi vs Honeycomb for one-to-one detail, the Honeycomb alternatives guide, or the OpenTelemetry integration. Sazabi's own plan prices are on the pricing page.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does New Relic or Honeycomb cost less for tracing?
It depends on span counts and bytes. Honeycomb counts one event per span and lists Pro from $150 per month for 50M events. New Relic counts gigabytes stored, free up to 100 GB per month, then $0.40 per GB, and adds per-user fees for full platform users. A system with many small spans can look cheap on New Relic and expensive on Honeycomb, and the reverse is possible with large spans.
Which one has more retention?
Honeycomb documents a fixed 60 days for events and logs and 13 months for time series metrics. New Relic defaults to 30 days for logs and 8 days for APM data, 120 and 98 days with Data Plus, and live archives can hold logs for up to seven years.
Does Honeycomb charge per user like New Relic?
No. Honeycomb lists unlimited seats and unlimited querying on every plan. New Relic charges for core users at $49 and full platform users from $10 on Standard or $349 on Pro with an annual commitment, while basic users are free.
Can I run either one in my own cloud account?
Honeycomb offers Private Cloud, which runs the full Honeycomb feature set in your own AWS account, either managed by Honeycomb or self-managed. The New Relic pages used for this comparison describe a hosted service with an optional EU data center and do not list a customer-hosted option.
Sources
- Free tier, per-GB ingest rates, user types and prices, Data Plus, compute pricing, synthetic checks, EU data center add-on (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Default retention by data source for the original data option and Data Plus (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Thirty-day default log retention and live archives up to seven years (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Log management free allowance, AI log alert summarization, no-code parsing, Federated Logs (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- APM agents, OpenTelemetry support, automatic Kubernetes instrumentation, 800+ integrations (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Autopilot capabilities, Slack use, plan and compute requirements, request limit (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- OpenTelemetry support and the OTLP endpoint (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Free, Pro and Enterprise limits, Pro starting price, triggers and SLOs per plan, unlimited seats, Enterprise base allowance, add-ons (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Event and data point definitions, sampling exclusions, overage and throttling steps, burst protection, retention periods (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Pro per-event rate of $3.00 per million events, legacy rate, grace period end date (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Logs stored as events, log-trace correlation with OpenTelemetry, logs counted against the event allowance (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Canvas, MCP server, anomaly detection (early access), no training on telemetry, team controls (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Automatic Canvas investigations of triggers, SLO burn alerts and anomalies, and their limits (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Private Cloud runs in your cloud account on AWS with the full feature set (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- OTLP over gRPC, HTTP/protobuf and HTTP/JSON for traces, logs and metrics (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Sazabi plan prices, included usage, overage rates and retention per plan (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Adding a Sazabi OTLP exporter next to existing Collector exporters (accessed Nov 8, 2026)