Honeycomb is an observability and tracing platform founded by Charity Majors and Christine Yen. Compare its free, Pro and Enterprise pricing plans.
Honeycomb was founded in 2016 in San Francisco by Charity Majors and Christine Yen, both of whom previously worked together at Parse, the mobile backend company acquired by Facebook. Their experience debugging complex distributed systems at Parse convinced them that traditional metrics dashboards and log searches were not enough to understand modern production software, which led directly to Honeycomb's approach of ingesting rich, high-cardinality event data that can be queried on the fly.
The company has become closely associated with popularizing the term 'observability' in software engineering, with Majors and Yen co-authoring the widely referenced book Observability Engineering. Honeycomb has raised approximately 150 million dollars across five funding rounds, most recently a 50 million dollar Series D in 2023, and employs roughly 100 to 250 people out of its San Francisco headquarters.
Honeycomb's core engine ingests wide, high-cardinality events rather than pre-aggregated metrics, enabling engineers to ask arbitrary exploratory questions about production behavior instead of being limited to dashboards defined in advance. Distributed tracing visualizes requests as they flow across microservices, and BubbleUp automatically surfaces which attributes correlate with an anomaly, cutting debugging time significantly.
The platform is a founding proponent of OpenTelemetry and ingests OTel traces, metrics and logs natively. Additional capabilities include Service Level Objectives (SLOs), triggers and alerting, a Service Map for visualizing dependencies, and newer AI features including a Canvas AI Copilot and an MCP server that lets AI coding agents query live telemetry directly.
Honeycomb's Free plan covers up to 20 million events and 100 million metrics data points per month at no cost, which is generous enough for individual projects, testing and small production workloads, and includes tracing, BubbleUp and OpenTelemetry support.
The Pro plan starts at 150 dollars per month for up to 750 million events monthly and adds SSO and more triggers and SLOs, while Enterprise is custom-priced around a 10-billion-events-per-year base allowance and adds a Query Data API, AWS PrivateLink, an SLO Reporting API and private cloud support for large, compliance-sensitive organizations. A separate Telemetry Pipeline product is billed from about 0.10 dollars per gigabyte for data routing and filtering.
Yes, Honeycomb offers a Free plan covering up to 20 million events and 100 million metrics data points per month, forever, with no credit card required.
Honeycomb was founded in 2016 in San Francisco by Charity Majors (CTO) and Christine Yen (CEO), both former engineers at Parse.
Pro plans start at 150 dollars per month for up to 750 million events monthly, billed monthly or annually, and add SSO, more triggers and more SLOs.
Yes, Honeycomb is a founding proponent of OpenTelemetry and natively ingests OTel traces, metrics and logs.
BubbleUp is a feature that automatically identifies which dimensions or attributes correlate with an anomaly or outlier, speeding up root-cause debugging.
Common alternatives include Datadog, New Relic, Grafana Cloud/Tempo, and Lightstep (now part of ServiceNow), along with lighter tools like Honeybadger for smaller teams.