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Honeycomb Enterprise vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 3, 2026

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

Honeycomb Enterprise
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
19th
Average Rating
7.4
Reviews Sentiment
5.5
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
AI Code Assistants (8th), AI Observability (18th)
SolarWinds Server and Appli...
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
18th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
4.5
Number of Reviews
44
Ranking in other categories
Server Monitoring (6th), Active Directory Management (8th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2026, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Honeycomb Enterprise is 1.1%, down from 1.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is 1.1%, down from 1.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor1.1%
Honeycomb Enterprise1.1%
Other97.8%
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

MukeshSharma - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Engineer at Qualys
Tracing microservices has exposed gaps in visibility but has provided high-cardinality insights
I have used better tools, I would say. I would not say that I prefer Honeycomb Enterprise as much. I have used Dynatrace, and I found it more comprehensive, and AppDynamics and other tools. These tools can also provide good information, but I find other tools better. Most of the products, I would say, such as Dynatrace or AppDynamics or New Relic, are targeting this microservices market. I think Honeycomb Enterprise can have something very dedicated for microservices because there is an explosion in the migration from monolithic to microservices. If Honeycomb Enterprise can create a stable solution which is easy to use and which gives additional value and helps for faster debugging with microservices, they can certainly gain market share from others. Tracing is already there. I just wish that these tools are a bit less cryptic. These tools sometimes get quite cryptic for new users. The less cryptic they can be made, that can help these tools. Another thing is that for microservices, when you have multiple microservices installed, that is also required. There are tools where you install on a single microservice, but then these microservices interact with multiple microservices. That kind of picture, I have seen that in AppDynamics; they do give a picture showing that a particular request which arrived here had interaction with these other third-party services or microservices and databases. That is what we need. That is what performance engineers and SREs need to see for each request, where it spent the entire time; how many other services or databases it interacted with and what took more or less time, and if there is a sequence, it should highlight that also. Was it parallel or if, for instance, a call to service A and then a call was made to a database, or a call to service A and a database were in parallel, that kind of information.
NikhilKalwint - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Specialist at ServiceIO
Monitoring over a thousand systems has improved decision making and operational visibility
From an advantage perspective, SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is comparatively cheaper from a commercial point of view. It is easy to install and configure, very user-friendly, and quick to get up and running, allowing you to see the early value adds in your organization. It is compatible with most technologies for monitoring with very few chances of incompatibility. Configuration also allows us to monitor all the technical parameters we are looking for, making it a very good experience for us. The alerting feature in SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is a main advantage, as it alerts based on threshold breaches and can raise tickets to the ticketing system, send SMS, and email notifications, allowing engineers to work on those tickets to resolve issues and avoid further impact. The visibility into server health is a beneficial feature that I am utilizing. We widely use various application performance metrics in SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor such as database monitoring and server monitoring, which are quite good enough for any monitoring solution. We utilize the customizable dashboards in SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Efficiency improvements in processes with Honeycomb Enterprise have definitely been seen, and the most representative example is that more projects can be handled than could be done prior to using Honeycomb Enterprise."
"It's very scalable since we used it for a really big organization and it worked."
"The solution's initial setup process was straightforward since we were getting enough support from Honeycomb.io's team."
"The biggest return on investment with Honeycomb Enterprise is being able to find, if I am doing production support and something goes wrong, the exact scenario or the exact request and response and the details of that really quickly."
"The approach offers significant benefits in terms of efficiency, consistency, and proactive security management, particularly valuable for organizations with large, distributed development teams."
"The solution's most valuable features are the queries for the OpenTelemetry events and all the tracing."
"Honeycomb Enterprise is effective because it helps teams quickly find, understand and debug unusual behavior in the complex systems."
"The most valuable feature of Honeycomb Enterprise for me is the root cause analysis part because it helps me greatly with the response messages and derived error messages which are very clearly mentioned in Honeycomb Enterprise logs."
"The initial setup was relatively easy, and we didn't have to install anything. All we had to do was put on the devices we wanted to monitor."
"I have found the visibility into server health with SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor very beneficial, which we use on a daily basis."
"The solution can be deployed quickly."
"Once we got our IT inventory organized and aligned with the business, we were able to leverage our Orion Platform to provide more than just a reactive-based monitoring service to the business."
"I am impressed with the tool's AppStack feature which mainly helps us in the identification process. This feature can give an overview of the fault and help us identify the issues for performance degradation. Instead of looking at multiple places, we can look at a single place to identify the issues."
"The recommendations are a life saver."
"It is scalable."
"SSL Certificate Monitoring and Expiry Alerting"
 

Cons

"The process of log scraping gets delayed on Honeycomb.io. At times, it gives false alerts to the application team."
"One challenge is that many things have to be defined manually and are not totally automated, while some competitors used for different projects or clients do have automation."
"However, the reason it's only five is because it's lagging behind in terms of AI-compatible features."
"Scaling was tricky as the pricing did not accommodate the scale initially as things grew, and throttling is expected based on the pricing models, but the biggest pain point was management or budgeting having to argue on why this was useful to upgrade to the newest pricing."
"I rate Honeycomb Enterprise a seven out of ten because I feel a lot of the journeys could be made cleaner."
"On the negative side, dashboarding is not that great."
"Regarding other aspects, I cannot comment fully because we only use that particular part for tracing the particular threads as per the issues and there are multiple issues in which we have not used it."
"I have used better tools, I would say. I would not say that I prefer Honeycomb Enterprise as much."
"Reporting is the only thing with which we currently have challenges. They have this in two ways. There is the report writer, which is the backend, and we also have web reports, which are on the console. So, they have removed the report writer for the backend reports, and we are making use of the web console, but most of the users are not finding it very interesting to use the frontend reports. I would like them to bring back the report writer. That's the key area within it to improve on the reporting. If they can bring back the report writer, then most users will actually be comfortable. I have some customers who are trying to export their report to an Excel format, but it is not possible because they said any report that has been done from the web console cannot be exported to Excel, but most of the customers need to export their reports to Excel. That's one area they need to work on."
"I think they need to make reporting easier and more simple & dynamic."
"A lot of times, we have to do a lot of manual cleanups."
"Having two places to build and manage alerts is not efficient and not all alerting tools are available in the trap manager."
"It lacks a user experience for measuring things like the end-to-end time for which a user waits for a specific response in the system. In the application layer, it has some very basic stuff. You have to build your own with manuscripts and things like that."
"I believe that SolarWinds should spend more effort in reporting."
"The setup was complex. We had local support to assist us."
"PerfStack can be made more effective. I am sure SolarWinds already has a plan for the same in coming versions."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"The licenses start from USD 3000.00 and go up to USD 20,000.00 for the year. It's a perpetual license. Nothing is free in SolarWinds, anything that you need is an additional cost."
"The price is too high."
"I have always said SolarWinds is very “proud” of their products, meaning they are expensive. I cannot afford to purchase all the licenses I need for all the SolarWinds products."
"Understanding the counts of objects to monitor will determine the licensing need. In terms of pricing, it’s not cheap but it’s not expensive as larger vendors whose products don’t have all the features or integrations."
"We pay around $ 2,000 to $ 5,000 yearly for the solution."
"The tool is available for my company at a good price point."
"Nagios XI, WhatsUpGold, Uptime Software, PRTG, Manage Engine, and SpiceWorks are the other tools that have lower pricing and licensing costs. However, they can't compete with SolarWinds when it comes to the features and functionality that SolarWinds can provide."
"Its licensing is on a yearly basis. It is just the standard price, but it can vary depending on the current rate of the dollar."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Educational Organization
13%
University
8%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise8
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business17
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise21
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Honeycomb.io?
If any particular issue is going to take half an hour for root cause analysis, by just getting the error code, particular HTTP status codes or response error messages, we can pinpoint the issues wi...
What is your primary use case for Honeycomb.io?
I was using Honeycomb Enterprise for checking the logs and for application purposes when we were trying to find bugs and errors in a particular application. We used Honeycomb Enterprise for HTTP st...
What advice do you have for others considering Honeycomb.io?
I have read about Honeycomb Enterprise's query engine and the visualization part, which is very interesting. However, those decisions were made by the top leads, so I am not part of that decision. ...
What needs improvement with SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor?
There is definitely room for improvement besides simplifying its setup. As a non-technical person, I believe the dashboards could be improved. Everything we use appears on video walls, and we need ...
What is your primary use case for SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor?
I am doing research as we currently have both solutions, and I am looking to see if we need both or can manage with one. Currently, the outcome indicates that we need both. The focus point is diffe...
 

Also Known As

Grit
SolarWinds SAM
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Clover Health, Eaze, Intercom, Fender
Andr. L. Riis AS, NetSuite
Find out what your peers are saying about Honeycomb Enterprise vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
902,988 professionals have used our research since 2012.