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 | Custom |
| Number of plans | 3 | 1 |
| 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
Pro
- All features from the Free Plan
- 100 Triggers
- 2 Service Level Objectives (SLOs)
- Single-Sign On (SSO)
- Honeycomb Support
- Monthly or Annual Subscription
Enterprise
Popular- All features from the Pro Plan
- 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 for personal projects
- 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
Honeycomb vs Better Stack FAQ
- Which one is cheaper?
- One or both use custom pricing, so it depends on your specific needs.
- 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 in the premium tier of the observability space, competing with Datadog and New Relic but positioning itself as the serious tool for teams that actually care about distributed tracing and high-cardinality data. They're not trying to win on price — they're targeting engineering-led orgs willing to pay for depth over breadth. Better Stack: At $29/responder, they're undercutting PagerDuty and Opsgenie on incident management while bundling observability that Datadog charges a premium for separately. They're going after mid-market engineering teams who are tired of stitching together three tools and paying enterprise prices for the privilege.
Keep tabs on both.
We'll monitor pricing changes for Honeycomb and Better Stack and let you know when something moves.