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Grafana vs Honeycomb Enterprise comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 27, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Grafana
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
6th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
47
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Honeycomb Enterprise
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
26th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
AI Code Assistants (11th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Grafana is 5.2%, down from 6.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Honeycomb Enterprise is 1.5%, up from 1.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Grafana5.2%
Honeycomb Enterprise1.5%
Other93.3%
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

Julian-Lewis - PeerSpot reviewer
Has provided real-time views and integrated insights across diverse data sources
The most valuable feature is Grafana's ability to plug in data or events and monitoring data from any kind of source. The graphing capability is what I use the most. I have made use of Grafana's customizable dashboards and templating features. These features have enhanced my data visualization and analytical processes by enabling me to give real-time views to our end-users of what they're doing or what their service is doing. The historical and trend data allow people to pull up data from Grafana and from whatever source to display it and examine how an environment is being used. I have employed real-time metric visualization capabilities for monitoring and real-time views. These dashboards can also be used as historical views, pulling out more data. The effectiveness of Grafana in delivering real-time notifications through its alerting system is quite good. The widgets are able to highlight errors if they happen in real-time on the dashboard. The alerting functionality is improving. I generally tend to use the monitoring tool for alerting rather than Grafana, but I have had to use Grafana occasionally without any issues.
Diego Gomes De Lima - PeerSpot reviewer
Easy to use and the dashboard is very intuitive
We faced some OpenTelemetry metrics lost between the communication from the service and the Honeycomb.io. I can't say if this is a Honeycomb.io issue or if there are some limitations in OpenTelemetry. Alerts are very helpful in Honeycomb.io, but we don't usually merge because we can compare queries with queries for making alerts. We can make alerts based on static numbers, which may block us from building alerts that could be generic enough or could be serviced.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"It provides a graphical representation and it's clear to see what's happening."
"It integrates well with other solutions."
"There are multiple kinds of models there to create dashboards, which is quite useful."
"Collaboration: Shares data and dashboards across teams."
"Plugin: Connecting Grafana to multiple APIs of leading monitoring tools and alerting tools."
"The initial setup is straightforward with just a few clicks on the solution's cloud."
"Compatibility with Prometheus databases and the Spring Boot application make it the first choice when moving toward an SRE model."
"Grafana is stable and has great engineers."
"The solution's most valuable features are the queries for the OpenTelemetry events and all the tracing."
"The solution's initial setup process was straightforward since we were getting enough support from Honeycomb.io's team."
 

Cons

"The main drawback is the necessity for endpoint monitoring."
"Multiple dashboards combined into one dashboard has slowed things down for us."
"Lacks event management which affects our DevOps people."
"I would give it a ten if it were much simpler for users who just want to get a simple objective in Grafana and are not experienced with technical configuration."
"The interface is not well-liked by my customers. Grafana cannot be easily embedded into certain applications and offers limited customization options for graphs."
"The solution has room for improvement with a better API to help automate the construction of the dashboards easier."
"There is a need for improvement in automating daily monitoring reports, especially when alerts are triggered due to system downtimes or fluctuations."
"Writing queries can be a bit difficult because the syntax must be maintained."
"The process of log scraping gets delayed on Honeycomb.io. At times, it gives false alerts to the application team."
"We can make alerts based on static numbers, which may block us from building alerts that could be generic enough or could be serviced."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We are using the open-source license."
"We use the open-source version of Grafana."
"My company uses the open-source version of Grafana, so it's free."
"The solution is expensive."
"For me, Grafana is a cheap tool because I don't have to spend much time learning the product since it is a simple solution."
"I give the price an eight out of ten."
"Since Grafana is an open-source solution, it is free of cost."
"​Grafana is free and open source.​"
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
20%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
6%
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business13
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise24
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Grafana?
The product's initial setup phase was very easy.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Grafana?
The costs associated with using Grafana are somewhere in the ten thousands because we are able to control the logs in a more efficient way to reduce it. That is pretty much great for us.
What needs improvement with Grafana?
The whole AI capability would be useful for Grafana in the future, and while I don't think we're mature yet, I would want to see improvements, especially in the tracing part, where following differ...
What needs improvement with Honeycomb.io?
We faced some OpenTelemetry metrics lost between the communication from the service and the Honeycomb.io. I can't say if this is a Honeycomb.io issue or if there are some limitations in OpenTelemet...
What is your primary use case for Honeycomb.io?
The solution is mainly used for stack observability. It observes service behavior or any kind of failure that may be happening. The tool is also related to research. My company is working more on t...
What advice do you have for others considering Honeycomb.io?
We set up Honeycomb.io on all the services so that we can have all the set traces of the communication between all the services inside the company. This helps us understand where it could be failin...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
Grit
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Microsoft, Adobe, Optum, Sky, Nvidia, Roblox, Wells Fargo, BlackRock, Informatica, Maersk, Daimler Truck, SNCF, Atlassian, DHL, SAP, JPMorgan Chase, Cisco, Citi and many others.
Clover Health, Eaze, Intercom, Fender
Find out what your peers are saying about Grafana vs. Honeycomb Enterprise and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
867,676 professionals have used our research since 2012.