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Grafana vs Honeycomb.io comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 20, 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
5th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
46
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Honeycomb.io
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
25th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
AI Code Assistants (11th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Grafana is 6.2%, up from 6.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Honeycomb.io is 1.6%, up from 1.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

Vikash-Agarwal - PeerSpot reviewer
Displays data visually from multiple sources while integrating seamlessly with existing systems
Grafana provides a user-friendly interface for viewing infrastructure metrics through dashboards. It integrates with Prometheus to pull data and offers a straightforward setup process. Users can monitor metrics with greater ease, and the tool aids in quickly identifying issues by providing a visual representation of data. Grafana's integration capability is straightforward, which facilitates building dashboards as needed.
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 integrates well with other solutions."
"Great capacity planning and the solution has a great GUI."
"The most valuable aspect is customization. There are many customizations possible, so I like that."
"Grafana saves us hours compared to DataDog."
"The initial setup is straightforward with just a few clicks on the solution's cloud."
"The most important feature of Grafana is its alarm formatting capability."
"It gives us the visibility we need. I like that when we add deployment markers or release markers, we know exactly when an issue arises. For instance, if there is an increased usage of CPU, we can link it directly to the deployment that might have caused the issue. It increases productivity and observability. We can now easily tell when a certain issue arises. It's way easier to debug because it can point you to certain things based on these markers, and we can debug easier."
"The integration between Loki and Tempo is valuable."
"The solution's initial setup process was straightforward since we were getting enough support from Honeycomb.io's team."
"The solution's most valuable features are the queries for the OpenTelemetry events and all the tracing."
 

Cons

"Setting up alerts via Grafana is a bit complicated, and alerting needs to improve."
"The solution should include online support."
"It is limited on the reporting type supported, which is important for managerial-level officers who want reports that are either general or specific."
"More dashboard is required, out-of-the-box, for OpenNMS."
"The solution must provide tutorials and guides."
"​The security needs to be improved, such as the capacity to add permissions on dashboards.​"
"The look and feel of the charting and graph capabilities in Grafana could improve. If they provided a storyboard type of feature as they have in other solutions, such as PowerBI. The multi-tenanted and stitch metrics features could improve."
"I find issues with Grafana. For example, I am unable to open some services there. Then, we have to open ten different tabs to get it fixed. And it's annoying when there's something going on; we want to check Grafana, and it throws four different errors."
"We can make alerts based on static numbers, which may block us from building alerts that could be generic enough or could be serviced."
"The process of log scraping gets delayed on Honeycomb.io. At times, it gives false alerts to the application team."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Since Grafana is an open-source solution, it is free of cost."
"I use the open source model so it is free."
"We use the open-source version of Grafana."
"You need to purchase the solution's license for its commercial use."
"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."
"We are using the open-source license."
"It's free of cost; it operates as an open-source tool."
"The solution is expensive."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
20%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Retailer
6%
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
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.io and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
861,803 professionals have used our research since 2012.