# Honeycomb Reviews **Vendor:** Honeycomb.io **Category:** [Observability Software](https://www.g2.com/categories/observability-software) **Average Rating:** 4.7/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 18 ## About Honeycomb Honeycomb is the observability platform that enables engineering teams to find and solve problems they couldn't before. Honeycomb’s approach is fundamentally different from other tools that claim observability, and is built to help teams answer novel questions about their ever-evolving cloud applications. Honeycomb is a modern observability platform built to help engineering teams quickly find and fix issues, including the ones they didn’t know to look for. Teams use Honeycomb to understand how their systems behave in production, get full context around every request, and resolve problems before customers notice. Where traditional tools separate logs, metrics, and traces, Honeycomb combines all telemetry into a single, unified event model. This enables fast, interactive querying across high-cardinality and high-dimensional data, so engineers can ask new questions without hitting limits or waiting minutes for results. Powered by a trace-first data store and designed for real-time exploration, Honeycomb makes it easy to pinpoint what’s broken, why it’s happening, and who is affected. It’s observability designed for modern, complex systems—simple to adopt, fast to query, and built to scale. ## Honeycomb Pros & Cons **What users like:** - Users praise Honeycomb for its **intuitive ease of use** , making complex data handling feel effortless and efficient. (9 reviews) - Users find Honeycomb’s **exceptional data insights** invaluable for understanding and improving their production systems effectively. (7 reviews) - Users find the **analytics capabilities** of Honeycomb revolutionary for efficiently understanding production systems and data correlations. (5 reviews) - Users praise the **exceptional customer support** of Honeycomb, highlighting their knowledgeable and engaged team as vital partners. (5 reviews) - Users value Honeycomb's **flexibility** in handling diverse data sets, simplifying both prototyping and production processes effectively. (5 reviews) - Data Analytics (4 reviews) - Real-time Monitoring (4 reviews) - Search Efficiency (4 reviews) - Tracing (4 reviews) - Tracing Tools (4 reviews) **What users dislike:** - Users find the **difficult learning** process challenging due to inadequate documentation and a steep learning curve. (3 reviews) - Users find Honeycomb **expensive** , though they acknowledge the value justifies the cost for effective observability. (3 reviews) - Users note a **steep learning curve** due to challenging documentation and the need for self-learning and external tools. (3 reviews) - Users find the **learning difficulty** of Honeycomb frustrating, as documentation and the initial curve hinder user experience. (3 reviews) - Users face **limitations on data tracking and history** , requiring additional tools for comprehensive analytics and reporting. (3 reviews) - Data Limitations (2 reviews) - Users desire more **control and features** in Honeycomb for easier quota management and broader reporting capabilities. (2 reviews) - Limited Reporting (2 reviews) - Metrics Limitations (2 reviews) - Users desire more control over **quota management features** , as current options are limited and inconvenient for reporting. (2 reviews) ## Honeycomb Reviews ### 1. Powerful Tool with Room for Documentation Improvement **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Belen D. | Integration Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 21, 2025 **What do you like best about Honeycomb?** I find Honeycomb particularly valuable for its ease of searching capabilities. Once familiar with the application, I can leverage its full potential and making my tasks much simpler and more efficient. The visual graphics are another aspect I truly enjoy; they are instrumental when I need to analyze maximum or average task completion times and assess potential delays in our services. The ease of initial setup was surprisingly convenient, simplifying my integration process with existing operations. Additionally, I appreciate the lower cost of Honeycomb compared to its competitors, making it a more budget-friendly option for our needs. **What do you dislike about Honeycomb?** I find the documentation for Honeycomb not easy to use, which makes the learning process much longer than it should be. There's not much information readily available, so it requires a lot of self-learning. This can be quite challenging for new users trying to discover the full potential of the app. **What problems is Honeycomb solving and how is that benefiting you?** I use Honeycomb to efficiently track and resolve backend API integration errors, leveraging its ease of search and insightful visual graphics to monitor task completion times and service delays. ### 2. Excellent product, completely upleveled our approach to observability. Game changer **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Julian W. | Senior Software Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 09, 2024 **What do you like best about Honeycomb?** As a product Honeycomb is excellent, the ability to look across all of our data in such an efficient and useful way has been revoloutionary for our approach to understanding our production systems. The customer support has been exceptional, and we have a lot of confidence in the Honeycomb employees who have given us advice as well as the documentation which they make available to lead you into a successful implementation of OpenTelemetry. This has become a tool I use daily and is my primary method for understanding the health of our systems **What do you dislike about Honeycomb?** There is a bit of a learning curve to get your head around how to use it well. The team will guide you through it, but just because of the vast amounts of data that is exposed it took some time for us to get up to speed so we can always find the most useful thing. However, once up to speed the product is incredibly easy to use **What problems is Honeycomb solving and how is that benefiting you?** Honeycomb solves the problem of understanding what is happening in our production systems in a manageable way. It consumes a vast amount of observability data and allows us to ask questions on the fly that we couldn't have predicted ahead of time ### 3. A must tool for observability best practices! **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 30, 2025 **What do you like best about Honeycomb?** Honeycomb is a great tool to monitor the health or our systems and alerting us about any ongoing issues. The way we can visualise data in a simple and intuitive way using graphics and other average typed metrics, and add custom trace headers tailored to our project's needs, makes it a essencial tool to have across all projects. Another crucial feature is the ability to setup alerts connecting with other tools like Slack, which makes it a crucial way to quickly react and fix any potential issues that might be impacting our customers. **What do you dislike about Honeycomb?** The only two points is the fact that we are not able to track payloads on Honeycomb, which limits some analytics for more specific cases, making us rely on other additional tools like logging Apps and such. Also, the fact that we can only get 60 days of history can limit our monitoring as well, and making the need to have tools in place to compliment Honeycomb. **What problems is Honeycomb solving and how is that benefiting you?** We use Honeycomb to monitor our API and services and to detect issues around performance and errors escalating in our applications. We also use it to trigger alerts connecting with other apps like Slack, so that we can be prompt to check and fix any compelling cases. ### 4. Custom Queries Make Easy Tracing **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Jaimin D. | Security Consultant, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 04, 2025 **What do you like best about Honeycomb?** Custome queries which helps tracing of data. **What do you dislike about Honeycomb?** Littlebit complex for L1 users. It requires external tools for custom reporting. **What problems is Honeycomb solving and how is that benefiting you?** Provies unified platform for all short of logs, metrics, traces in to a single platfrom. This helps to share information rapidly across the team. ### 5. Observability Tool That Drives the Industry **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Bruno C. | Principal Site Reliability Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 20, 2025 **What do you like best about Honeycomb?** On a practical level, the platform offers a range of tools that enhance our understanding of systems. It features an easy-to-use yet powerful query engine, excellent visualizations, first-class Service Level Objective (SLO) support, and a robust correlations feature. Support for OpenTelemetry has been essential for us, as it helps avoid vendor lock-in, giving us the confidence to base our decisions on the quality of the product rather than being tied to a specific vendor. On a conceptual level, Honeycomb has elevated distributed tracing to a first-class feature, leading to new and improved approaches to production investigations, incident handling, and system design. For many teams within our company, observability has now become an integral part of the design process rather than an afterthought. The customer support team and our account manager are excellent. They are always available to assist, highly proactive, and friendly. **What do you dislike about Honeycomb?** As part of the platform team, we are also responsible for cost management. I would like to see features related to governance, quota management, and automated cost reporting. **What problems is Honeycomb solving and how is that benefiting you?** Improved insight into our systems fosters a better user experience. ### 6. Best-in-class in the space **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Martin A. | VP of Engineering, Logistics and Supply Chain, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 11, 2024 **What do you like best about Honeycomb?** Being able to throw events at Honeycomb without having to think about how you'll need to interrogate the date ahead of time feels a bit like magic. It's the most stable part of our infrastructure, allowing us to focus on the problems that matter to us. The group of humans that make up the company is also a huge part of why you should choose Honeycomb, an observability platform is an integral part of your development process so it's more akin to a partnership than a service provider. The sales and support folks are knowledgeable, friendly and have been great partners to us. **What do you dislike about Honeycomb?** I would love to be able to have more control in-product around quota management. It's solveable by using Refinery, but not as convenient as being able to fine-tune it as part of the SaaS offering. **What problems is Honeycomb solving and how is that benefiting you?** They are the first place to go to when trying to understand how our system is behaving in production. ### 7. Excellent Observability Solution **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Dominic M. | Principal Software Engineer, Observability Architecture, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 26, 2024 **What do you like best about Honeycomb?** The best thing about Honeycomb is the capability to deal with completely arbitrary data with infinite cardinality. While structure is always preferable, Honeycomb can deal with uncertainty better than any other system I've used. This means Honeycomb is great for prototyping as well as full on vetted production systems. Throw anything at it and it can handle it witih ease and precision. **What do you dislike about Honeycomb?** Sometimes I feel like the data retention period is not long enough, but if you know that limitation going in, it doesn't really matter. **What problems is Honeycomb solving and how is that benefiting you?** Honeycomb is integral to our Observability platform, enabling developers, infrastructure, management, and others to fully see the states of our production system. Honeycomb, among other things, is the primary point of distributed trace access for our systems and we can't think of a better product for this. ### 8. Honeycomb helps develop a culture of curiosity **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Tyler K. | Director of Software Engineering, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 26, 2024 **What do you like best about Honeycomb?** Honeycomb is very easy to get started with. It was the tool that we saw the most developer engagement with. Their pricing model also allows everyone who is curious to have access to the data. Their team is also amazing to work with. They genuinely want to see you succeed in your observability journey. **What do you dislike about Honeycomb?** It's hard to come up with cons. Adding all of your infrastructure events to Honeycomb can be expensive without sampling. However, we use it primarily for application observability. **What problems is Honeycomb solving and how is that benefiting you?** Honeycomb provides application observabillity using standard open telemetry libraries. It encourages high dimensionality and high cardinality data. They also offer a ton of training and resources to help get you started. ### 9. Powerful tool with amazing support team **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Michael B. | Senior Developper, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 04, 2025 **What do you like best about Honeycomb?** The querying engine is really powerful. It lets you understand your system through strong correlation and anomaly detection. **What do you dislike about Honeycomb?** I would love to see a better visualization of the SLOs, especially being able to see multiple budget burns at once (from different SLOs) on a custom time frame. **What problems is Honeycomb solving and how is that benefiting you?** Lack of visibility of what is hapening in production and also a centralized place to store all these informations. ### 10. Top Tier Observability **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Financial Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 26, 2024 **What do you like best about Honeycomb?** Honeycomb is an intuitive and effective tool for observability. We have saved countless hours solving issues by using Honeycomb, which has translated into happier engineers and customers. On top of all that, they have a great team that is highly engaged with us. They act as partners and genuinely listen to our feedback. **What do you dislike about Honeycomb?** There isn't anything to dislike. It's not cheap, but with Honeycomb, you get what you pay for. **What problems is Honeycomb solving and how is that benefiting you?** We use Honeycomb to ensure our platform is performing within the SLAs we have with our customers. We rely on a number of downstream vendors and Honeycomb is also helpful for surfacing any issues that may occur with those parties. In addition, we use Honeycomb extensively during our deploys to ensure that we resolves any introduced issues in a timely fashion. ### 11. Amazing tool that incentivizes your teams to adpot best practice and future proof your observability **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Simon D. | Senior Research Software Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 04, 2024 **What do you like best about Honeycomb?** Bubble up features and correlations, and the ability to jump back and forth between high-level aggregation and low-level individual request detail **What do you dislike about Honeycomb?** It *only* does timeseries, no roll ups or longer aggregation. They have good reasons for this, but it does mean for business metric reporting, you still need something else **What problems is Honeycomb solving and how is that benefiting you?** Incident response, improving MTTR, capacity planning, and more generaly understanding how users are using our system. ### 12. New favorite observability tool **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Benjamin O. | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 02, 2024 **What do you like best about Honeycomb?** The deep analysis possible on super high cardinality data and traces makes it our first stop when troubleshooting or working an incident. **What do you dislike about Honeycomb?** Nothing really. Perhaps some more development in traditional o11y spaces that we still need (legacy logs, Prometheus metrics visualization, etc.) **What problems is Honeycomb solving and how is that benefiting you?** Reducing mean time to issue identification and resolution with our products and systems ### 13. A transformative tool **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Blake I. | Observability Engineering Lead, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 09, 2024 **What do you like best about Honeycomb?** Honey, let's you think about your production telemetry like an analyst would think about customer data. **What do you dislike about Honeycomb?** It's not free 😂 (but the pricing model is super easy to work with). **What problems is Honeycomb solving and how is that benefiting you?** Honeycomb helps my engineering teams more rapidly orient themselves when dealing with issues. ### 14. One stop solution for your every problem **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Mohammed J. | web design, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 24, 2023 **What do you like best about Honeycomb?** Honeycomb dose what it says, making it easy to put our code in, our code set up with opentracking before we used, this helps us set up everything and i share what i learn with my friends too, **What do you dislike about Honeycomb?** So far i have not faced anything issue with the product, so no dislike **What problems is Honeycomb solving and how is that benefiting you?** Honeycomb is best pricing model, we can shove info, it solving our web software, debuging issues very easy and quickly ### 15. Observability redefined with Honeycomb **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Avinash U. | DevOps Engineer-I, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 27, 2021 **What do you like best about Honeycomb?** The BubbleUp feature, which provides a clear view of the data at a particular time interval, is beneficial for knowing what's wrong with the system. Another handy feature is the Query History, which provides information about the queries run by others on the team. This is helpful in cases we can use a teammates query and modify it for our use case without brainstorming the entire query. The UI is very intuitive, and the Honeycomb team provides excellent support in terms of training and getting set up. Honeycomb works well with open telemetry, which is a massive benefit due to no vendor lock-in. **What do you dislike about Honeycomb?** Although it is a wonderful solution for observability, it is not the complete solution for monitoring and observability due to the lack of features like Real User Monitoring, which is very relevant to our product. There is no live tail of logs and way to setup archiving/retention of data in Honeycomb yet. **What problems is Honeycomb solving and how is that benefiting you?** We used Honeycomb as our observability solution. It paid off well since the data presented by Honeycomb was perfect for troubleshooting, and we were able to identify issues quickly using the tool. ### 16. Honeycomb makes it easy to understand and debug our applications in our distributed architecture. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Shahbaz T. | Senior Software Engineer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 09, 2022 **What do you like best about Honeycomb?** Provides great insights into various metrics around our applications and services and helps us debug and troubleshoot a lot easier. **What do you dislike about Honeycomb?** It can be challenging to navigate at times, but this is just a nitpick. **Recommendations to others considering Honeycomb:** If you're running applications / services that are integral to your business and require deep understanding of how they're performing with ability to debug the data and information that pass through then this is a tool worth looking into. **What problems is Honeycomb solving and how is that benefiting you?** We're using it as a tool to monitor, maintain, enhance and troubleshoot our distributed applications and services. ### 17. A refreshing approach to observability **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 17, 2021 **What do you like best about Honeycomb?** Being able to detect outliers using its "BubbleUp" functinality it's a life saver. We are big on metric dimensions and the amount of datapoints and tags can be overwhelming, but Honeycomb really excels there especially when compared with competitors which tend to abuse average/max/sum grouping that can hide real issues. **What do you dislike about Honeycomb?** Adding simple/out-of-the-box anomaly detection based triggers would be a nice addition so we don't have to rely so much on thresholds or use more complex derived columns for simple variations in standard patterns like the amount of HTTP Requests, error rates and so on **What problems is Honeycomb solving and how is that benefiting you?** We use Honeycomb to have better observability on modern NodeJS applications and get alerted when it really matters. ### 18. A Great Way to Work **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Josh S. | Any, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 24, 2019 **What do you like best about Honeycomb?** I like that Honeycomb is an event-driven observability platform for debugging systems, application code, and databases. Honeycomb ingests structured data and performs read-time query aggregation to support speedy analytics over ultra-rich datasets without indexes or schemas to maintain, and a fast, interactive interface. Honeycomb is designed to help you fix any errors or problems you have when working **What do you dislike about Honeycomb?** I dislike query aggregation to support speedy analytics over ultra-rich datasets without indexes or schemas to maintain, and a fast, interactive interface. Honeycomb is designed to help your team answer unpredictable new questions — quickly, accurately, and painlessly. It provides real-time, interactive introspection for your data at a scale that would drown or bankrupt other apps Honeycomb is built for collaboration, so everyone on a team can explore the system without needing root access or years of institutional knowledge **What problems is Honeycomb solving and how is that benefiting you?** Investigate system performance by any axis to improve overall speeds. Isolate signal from noise and dive deep into tracking down performance problems. - [View Honeycomb pricing details and edition comparison](https://www.g2.com/products/honeycomb/reviews?section=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-05-13+09%3A04%3A06+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=9990ddb5-fea6-44aa-b13b-e8aaf4976c7e&secure%5Btoken%5D=a951c4efa7ec1b7d0cf9b79d5caefecf5c3bb953f02af1abe6a858299677ef50&format=llm_user) ## Honeycomb Integrations - [Slack](https://www.g2.com/products/slack/reviews) - [Slack Connector for Jira](https://www.g2.com/products/slack-connector-for-jira/reviews) ## Honeycomb Features **Functionality** - Baseline - Alerting - Multi-Site Monitoring - Reporting - Multi-Channel Alerting - Location Insights **Monitoring** - Usage Monitoring - Database Monitoring - API Monitoring - Real-Time Monitoring - Cloud Infrastructure Monitoring - Security and Compliance Monitoring **Visibility** - Dashboards and Visualizations - Alerts and Notifications - Reporting **Functionality** - Diverse Systems Monitoring - Real-Time Analytics - Observability - AI/ML Integration **Data Preparation** - Data Sources - Indexing - Automated Tagging - Data Blending **Monitoring** - Performance Baselines - Performance Analysis - Performance Monitoring - AI/ML Assistance - Multi-System Monitoring **Alerts management** - Multi-mode alerts - Opimization alerts - Incident alerts **Telemetry Collection & Ingestion - Observability** - Multi-Telemetry Ingestion - OpenTelemetry Support **Agentic AI - AWS Marketplace** - Autonomous Task Execution - Multi-step Planning - Cross-system Integration **Agentic AI - Observability Software** - Autonomous Task Execution - Multi-step Planning - Cross-system Integration - Adaptive Learning - Natural Language Interaction - Proactive Assistance - Decision Making **Administration** - Activity Monitoring - Multi-Cloud Management - Automation - Auto-Scaling & Resource Optimization **Monitoring and Management** - Automation - Performance Baseline - Real-Time Monitoring **Management** - Single Pane of Glass - Dashboards and Visualization - Performance Baselines - Alerting **Analysis** - Track Trends - Detect Anomalies - Metric and Event Data - Search - Alerts - Live Tail **Response** - Dashboards and Visualization - Incident Alerting - Root Cause Analysis (RCA) **Monitoring** - Resource utilization - Real-time monitoring - Performance baseline - API monitoring **Visualization & Dashboards - Observability** - Service Dependency Mapping - Unified Dashboard - Trace Visualization **Agentic AI - Website Monitoring** - Autonomous Task Execution - Multi-step Planning - Cross-system Integration - Adaptive Learning - Natural Language Interaction - Proactive Assistance - Decision Making **Automation** - Resolution automation - Automation **Analysis** - Reporting - Dashboards and Visualizations - Spend Forecasting and Optimization **Visualization** - Dashboards - Data Discovery **Correlation & Root Cause Analysis - Observability** - Cross-Telemetry Correlation - Root Cause Detection - Intelligent Alerting **Agentic AI - Application Performance Monitoring (APM)** - Autonomous Task Execution - Cross-system Integration - Adaptive Learning - Proactive Assistance - Decision Making **Agentic AI - Log Monitoring** - Autonomous Task Execution - Multi-step Planning - Cross-system Integration - Adaptive Learning - Natural Language Interaction - Proactive Assistance - Decision Making **Agentic AI - Enterprise Monitoring** - Autonomous Task Execution - Multi-step Planning - Cross-system Integration - Adaptive Learning - Natural Language Interaction - Proactive Assistance - Decision Making **Analysis** - Search - Reporting - Visualization - Track trends **Scalability & Ecosystem Integration - Observability** - Kubernetes Monitoring - Hybrid/Multi-Cloud Support **Agentic AI - Log Analysis** - Autonomous Task Execution - Multi-step Planning - Cross-system Integration - Adaptive Learning - Natural Language Interaction - Proactive Assistance - Decision Making **Agentic AI - Cloud Infrastructure Monitoring** - Multi-step Planning - Cross-system Integration - Adaptive Learning - Natural Language Interaction - Proactive Assistance - Decision Making **Issue Resolution** - Root cause identification - Resolution guidance - Proactive identification **AI Features - Observability** - Predictive Insights - AI-Generated Incident Summaries - AI Anomaly Detection **AI Automation - Cloud Infrastructure Monitoring** - AI-Powered Anomaly Detection - AI-Driven Insight Recommendations **Performance** - Real User Monitoring (RUM) - Second by Second Metrics **Functionality** - Synthetic Monitoring - Dynamic Transaction Mapping - Load Balancing - Cloud Observability ## Top Honeycomb Alternatives - [Datadog](https://www.g2.com/products/datadog/reviews) - 4.4/5.0 (689 reviews) - [Dynatrace](https://www.g2.com/products/dynatrace/reviews) - 4.5/5.0 (1,231 reviews) - [New Relic](https://www.g2.com/products/new-relic/reviews) - 4.4/5.0 (568 reviews)