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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
15th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
5.7
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
AI Code Assistants (8th), AI Observability (10th)
SolarWinds Server and Appli...
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
19th
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 August 2026, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Honeycomb Enterprise is 1.0%, down from 1.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is 1.0%, 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 (%)
Honeycomb Enterprise1.0%
SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor1.0%
Other98.0%
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

EN
Tech Consultant at multi ideal
Observability has transformed how I troubleshoot microservices and reduce incident time
Overall, I have had a very good experience with Honeycomb Enterprise, but there are a few areas where it could be improved. I would like to see more out-of-the-box dashboards and templates for common Kubernetes and cloud-native workloads so that new users can get value more quickly. The learning curve can be steep, especially for engineers who are new to distributed tracing and observability concepts. Additionally, while the query capabilities are very powerful, there are times when specifying advanced query workflows could be improved to provide a better overall experience for troubleshooting and observability. Beyond what I mentioned, there are a few other areas that could also be improved. I would like to see even deeper native integration with more DevOps and ITSM tools to make it easier to connect observability data directly into incident management and operational workflows. Regarding pricing, Honeycomb Enterprise delivers strong value, but as organizations scale and generate larger volumes of telemetry, cost can become a consideration. More flexible pricing options or cost optimization features for high-volume environments would be helpful. My support experience has been generally positive, but faster turnaround time for complex technical issues and more advanced implementation guides or best practices documentation would make onboarding and troubleshooting easier. These improvements would make an already strong observability platform even more accessible and scalable for enterprise teams.
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

"The approach offers significant benefits in terms of efficiency, consistency, and proactive security management, particularly valuable for organizations with large, distributed development teams."
"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 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."
"From a pros perspective, Honeycomb Enterprise could be a better candidate with high cardinality; when there are too many unique values, Honeycomb Enterprise could be more beneficial there."
"Honeycomb Enterprise is effective because it helps teams quickly find, understand and debug unusual behavior in the complex systems."
"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."
"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."
"The most valuable feature of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is its powerful monitoring capabilities."
"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."
"AppInsight. Provides a simple way to get very in-depth monitoring configured for our most popular applications. Exchange, SQL, and SharePoint."
"SolarWinds is one of the best products on the market and if they eventually support the IBM Mainframe then it will be perfect."
"SolarWinds is a very stable platform compared to others on the market."
"From a customers point of view, they get a good return on investment because they are not paying a lot of money when you compare to what they used to pay for IBM and other large vendors."
"SSL Certificate Monitoring and Expiry Alerting"
"The recommendations are a life saver."
 

Cons

"On the negative side, dashboarding is not that great."
"One of the disadvantages or areas for improvement I see is that it is very costly. My honest opinion is that its service is very good, but for me as an individual, if I am using it in a small app, it creates a huge amount of data and it is very expensive to manage."
"We can make alerts based on static numbers, which may block us from building alerts that could be generic enough or could be serviced."
"I have used better tools, I would say. I would not say that I prefer Honeycomb Enterprise as much."
"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."
"The process of log scraping gets delayed on Honeycomb.io. At times, it gives false alerts to the application team."
"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."
"The learning curve can be steep, especially for engineers who are new to distributed tracing and observability concepts."
"SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor could improve by having a cloud version. They have an observability platform but it still needs to be maintained by us."
"Application-based monitoring, such as monitoring within servers like Apache and IIS, has room for improvement."
"The technical support team's response time could be improved."
"As per my view, Solarwinds should come up the same monitoring system for other certificate expiration alert apart from SSL."
"In terms of the dashboards on offer, they should work to improve them. The types of dashboards that you get in terms of the graphs on offer aren't ideal right now."
"The templates could use improvement. Currently, they are quite complex. They should have drag-and-drop functionality instead. It would make it easier to use."
"From an integration point of view, if you want to have a manager of manager kind of layer, that is currently lacking in SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor."
"One area that could benefit from improvement is its performance"
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"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."
"The solution's price is reasonable. Though it's on the higher side, the tool is worth the money."
"We are on an annual license to use the solution. The price of the solution is expensive. The price is based on a bunch of factors, such as the number of engines and elements."
"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."
"I like the pricing for this SolarWinds product."
"Price can always be lower. It is neither on the expensive side nor on the cheap side. We have worked with them for a lot of years, so we get a discount due to the size of the installation."
"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."
"When compared to other licensed models in the market, it stands out as one of the more cost-effective options."
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Top Industries

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

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise12
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business17
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise21
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Honeycomb.io?
Overall, I have had a very good experience with Honeycomb Enterprise, but there are a few areas where it could be improved. I would like to see more out-of-the-box dashboards and templates for comm...
What is your primary use case for Honeycomb.io?
I have been using Honeycomb Enterprise for the past three years. My main use case has been troubleshooting and performing monitoring for Kubernetes-based applications and microservices.
What advice do you have for others considering Honeycomb.io?
I would say that Honeycomb Enterprise takes governance and security very seriously. I appreciate that it supports enterprise features such as role-based access control, SSO integration, and audit c...
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: August 2026.
909,948 professionals have used our research since 2012.