Honeycomb vs Better Stack Pricing (2026)
How do these two stack up on price? Here's what each one costs, what you get, and where the value sits.
| Honeycomb | Better Stack | |
|---|---|---|
| Starts at | $150/mo | $34/mo |
| Number of plans | 3 | 3 |
| Free plan | ||
| Free trial | — | |
| Pricing model | usage-based | hybrid |
Free
- 2 Triggers
- Distributed Tracing
- BubbleUp
- OpenTelemetry Support
- Team Query History
- Query Result Permalinks
- Honeycomb Metrics
- Canvas AI Copilot
- Honeycomb MCP
- Agent Timeline
Pro
- 100 Triggers
- 2 Service Level Objectives (SLOs)
- Single-Sign On (SSO)
- Honeycomb Support
- Monthly or Annual Subscription
Enterprise
Popular- Starts with 300 Triggers
- Starts with 100 SLOs
- Service Map
- Enterprise Support for Refinery
- Enterprise-Grade Support + Onboarding
- Query Data API
- AWS PrivateLink
- SLO Reporting API
- Support for Honeycomb Private Cloud
Free
- 10 monitors & heartbeats, 1 status page
- Slack & e-mail alerts
- 100,000 exceptions per month
- 5,000 session replays
- 3 GB logs retained for 3 days
- 3 GB traces retained for 3 days
- 30 GB metrics
- 3 GB web events retained for 3 days
Team member
- Free access to Telemetry
Responder
- Access to Uptime with incident management, on-call, monitoring and status pages with unlimited phone call and SMS alerts
Honeycomb vs Better Stack FAQ
- Which one is cheaper?
- Better Stack is the cheaper option, starting at $34/mo vs $150/mo for Honeycomb.
- Can I use either one for free?
- Both offer free plans, so you can try each without paying. Start with whichever fits your workflow better and upgrade when you hit the limits.
- How do they charge?
- Different approach here. Honeycomb uses usage-based pricing, while Better Stack goes with hybrid. That changes the math depending on your team size and usage.
- Which one is a better deal?
- Depends on what you need. Honeycomb: Honeycomb sits mid-to-premium in the observability space — pricier than bare-bones logging tools but positioned as a specialist for teams doing real distributed tracing and high-cardinality debugging, not a Datadog-style everything-platform. They're chasing engineering-first orgs who've outgrown basic APM and want query speed on messy production data, not enterprises just checking a monitoring box. Better Stack: This sits mid-market — not a bargain-bin uptime checker, not an enterprise incident command platform like PagerDuty. The free tier and modular pricing are clearly aimed at scrappy engineering teams who don't want to pay for seats they don't need but will happily pay for the specific features they do.
Still deciding? See the best Honeycomb alternatives or the best Better Stack alternatives, ranked with verified pricing.
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