Honeycomb is an observability solution with a modern approach that’s fundamentally different from other platforms. It’s built to help teams find and solve unexpected problems within their ever-evolving cloud applications without running into roadblocks and production slowdowns.
With Honeycomb’s observability approach, users can speed up debugging dramatically, escape escalating costs, and avoid the cost/visibility tradeoff in observability tooling by removing the need for disparate tools and data sources. Honeycomb is the only tool you need.
With Honeycomb, companies can experience profound cost savings:
$1.9M
increased revenue due to higher uptime and performance
$940,000
cost savings from avoided employee churn
$422,000
decrease in legacy solution dependence and tool sprawl
$2M
cost savings from faster incident response
New Relic is a SaaS platform that provides software monitoring and analytics. Engineering teams rely on New Relic to visualize, analyze, and troubleshoot their software.
Compare our capabilities
| Capability | Honeycomb | New Relic |
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Transcends three pillars approach for one single source of truth |
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Instant, unrestricted analysis and parsing of highly specific values |
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Faster debugging with context retained to drill down and filter at every view |
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Real-time querying and pattern detection on production code |
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Actionable alerts with accurate service level objectives (SLOs) |
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Full compatibility with OpenTelemetry |
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Pricing scales with complexity to prepare for any unknowns |
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Designed for engineering efficiency and collaboration across your team |
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Real user monitoring |
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AI-powered querying capabilities to facilitate engineer adoption |
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Debug using logs with line and attribute analysis |
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Unified telemetry pipeline for traces, logs, and metrics |
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Last updated: 10/15/2024 |
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Dive deeper into the differences
Transcends three pillars approach for one unified source of truth
While some orgs like to have New Relic’s logs, metrics, traces, network, and real user monitoring signals all stored separately and correlating together, it’s easy to see how others think that many separate tabs convolute what’s really important.
With Honeycomb, wide events make it possible to rely on a singular debugging solution, consolidating multiple use cases into one workflow. Honeycomb’s trace/log events stitch together events to illuminate what happened within the flow of system interactions. And unlike metrics, which provide indirect signals about user experience, tracing in Honeycomb models how your users are actually interacting with your system, surfacing up relevant events by comparing across all columns. And unlike metrics-based tools, Honeycomb never breaks when you need to analyze highly-contextual data within your system.
Instant, unrestricted analysis and parsing of highly specific values
Honeycomb lets you instantly filter by high-cardinality data (userID, hostID) from any view. In New Relic, common metric dashboard and SLO views are pre-aggregated, and cannot be parsed by granular, specific fields.
Faster debugging with context retained to drill down and filter on every graph view
Honeycomb’s rich context analysis makes debugging faster from any point. Dramatically speed up investigations by automatically detecting hidden outliers with BubbleUp. Highlight anomalies on any heatmap visualization or query result, and BubbleUp will surface which events have the highest degree of difference across thousands of high-cardinality and high-dimensionality events. Because BubbleUp is an easy to grasp visualization tool, any team member can quickly identify outliers for further investigation.
New Relic does not make it easy to find hidden attributes behind any issue or anomalous trend in any data. To retrieve important context, your team has to cycle between separate data sources and context stored in separate formats—a time-consuming task that can slow down debugging and requires zooming in and out multiple times.
Real-time querying and pattern detection on production code
With Honeycomb, you can query across all fields instantly from production without pre-indexing and find patterns in every granular attribute or datapoint.
With New Relic, complex querying is siloed to NRQL experts and restricted by data type, and automatic pattern detection is high-level metric based. Instant analysis is not performant, because it takes time for indexed, queryable data to ingest.
Actionable alerts with accurate service level objectives (SLOs)
Honeycomb provides event-based SLOs, enabling higher-fidelity alerts that give teams insight into the underlying “why.” When errors begin, Honeycomb SLOs can ping your engineers in an escalating series of alerts. Unlike other vendors, Honeycomb SLOs reveal the underlying event data so anyone can quickly see how to improve performance against a particular objective.
With New Relic, SLO counts are aggregated from streamed events or metrics, and do not retain full context.
Full compatibility with OpenTelemetry
Honeycomb supports and contributes to OpenTelemetry (OTel), a vendor-agnostic framework that enables teams to instrument, collect, and export rich telemetry data. Prior to OTel, teams were stuck using vendors’ proprietary SDKs; with OTel, you can instrument once and send to multiple tools if needed, avoiding vendor lock-in.
New Relic offers limited support for OpenTelemetry. For normal feature availability they require the use of their proprietary APM agents, which contributes to vendor lock-in.
Pricing scales with complexity to prepare for any unknowns
New Relic pricing limits context by billing per byte ingested, and limits scaling to teams by charging for different seat tiers or by anyone’s activity/views/loads.
With Honeycomb, you simply pay by event volume—not by seats, servers, views, or fields—solving the cost/visibility tradeoff. Unlike legacy tools, Honeycomb enables you to capture unlimited custom attributes for debugging, with no impact on spend. Honeycomb charges by number of events, not how much data each event contains.
Designed for engineering efficiency and collaboration across your team
New Relic offers different levels of analysis for different seat tiers, or discourages analysis by charging per query, load, or even individual views. Workflows are split between different technical tools to learn that slow efficiency.
With Honeycomb, onboard as many users as needed for free, and all can enjoy full analysis, usage, team history, and AI assistance features with one workflow to learn and adopt for all signal sources.
Real User Monitoring
New Relic and Honeycomb both offer RUM dashboards and capabilities.
Going beyond RUM capabilities, Honeycomb for Frontend Observability gives engineers the unified, granular data they need to quickly pinpoint issues across their stack and understand user impact. Click through the standard RUM views to the event attributes and queries behind them.
AI-powered querying capabilities to facilitate engineer adoption
Unlike with other tools, engineers using Honeycomb don’t need to be experts in a specific query language to ask intelligent questions about their systems—Query Assistant enables them to ask in plain English. An engineer can, for example, ask for slow endpoints by status code and Honeycomb will run a relevant query and return results to help start the investigation.
New Relic offers AI assistance but does not execute queries with access to its features and visuals from a language prompt.
See what our customers have to say
“Honeycomb is the perfect fit for our observability needs, offering a blend of user-friendly features and unparalleled visibility. It has become an integral part of our operational toolkit, empowering our development and customer support teams to swiftly navigate and resolve issues.“
“The main difference in value that Honeycomb brings is that it allows anyone to ask questions and leverage observability—not just a select few due to plan restrictions or engineering experience. Unlike other vendors, Honeycomb’s modern definition of observability goes beyond metrics, logs, and traces, offering our team a holistic understanding of system behavior.“
“Honeycomb moved us in a direction of better and happier engineering outcomes. Honeycomb really fills a gap with my existing tools by providing insight into what’s actually going on inside applications. You look at the graphs and go, my application is doing what!? You can then go ahead and fix it.“