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It's a split decision.
Choose New Relic for a broad observability stack covering applications, infrastructure, logs, security and digital experience, especially if per-user plans fit your team. Choose Honeycomb for investigating distributed production systems with high-cardinality event data, BubbleUp and OpenTelemetry-native workflows. Both offer free plans and AI monitoring. Compare New Relic’s ingest and user costs with Honeycomb’s event and metric ceilings against your own telemetry volume before committing.
01Side by side
| New Relic | Honeycomb | |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | Per-user plans plus usage-based ingest | Event-volume plans with metric ceilings |
| Free tier | 100 GB ingest monthly; one full-platform user | 20M events and 100M metric points monthly |
| Integrations | OpenTelemetry, Kubernetes, cloud environments, LLMs | OpenTelemetry-native; Honeycomb MCP server |
| API and SDKs | OpenTelemetry support; SDK languages not specified | MCP server; SDK languages not specified |
| Platforms | Web | Web |
| Limits and scaling | Ingest overages; user and retention charges apply | Pro caps at 750M events monthly |
| AI agent integration | Monitors models and agents; sends insights to agents | MCP server gives agents production context |
| Production investigation | Correlates application, infrastructure, logs and security | High-cardinality tracing, real-time queries and BubbleUp |
New Relic Choose New Relic if
- Choose New Relic if you need application, infrastructure, log and security monitoring together.
- Choose New Relic if per-user pricing fits your team and ingest stays within budget.
- Choose New Relic if digital experience and session-friction monitoring matter.
Honeycomb Choose Honeycomb if
- Choose Honeycomb if distributed tracing and high-cardinality production queries are central.
- Choose Honeycomb if you want BubbleUp and collaborative AI investigations.
- Choose Honeycomb if event-based pricing fits your telemetry volume.
02Pricing at real usage
New Relic Free includes 100 GB of monthly ingest, one full-platform user, unlimited basic users, 500 synthetic checks and at least eight days of retention. Standard starts at $10 monthly for its first full-platform user; additional full-platform users are $99 each, up to five. Core users are $49. Ingest beyond 100 GB costs $0.40/GB. Pro is $349 per user monthly with an annual commitment or $418.80 month to month.
Honeycomb Free includes up to 20M events and 100M metric data points monthly. Pro starts at $150 per 50M events, with a limit of 750M events monthly and 3.75B metric data points. Both prices scale differently: New Relic adds user and ingest costs, while Honeycomb’s published Pro entry price is event-based. Model your telemetry against each plan’s limits before choosing.
03API, SDKs and integration
New Relic’s homepage lists OpenTelemetry, Kubernetes, cloud environments, LLMs, agents and microservices. Its platform spans application, infrastructure, log, security and user-experience monitoring. It also describes an agentic platform that delivers observability insights to AI agents. Honeycomb is OpenTelemetry-native and provides a Honeycomb MCP server for giving AI agents production context. Its feature set centers on distributed tracing, high-cardinality event data, real-time queries, BubbleUp and AI investigations in Canvas.
The vendor pages do not specify SDK languages, CLI commands or API rate limits. That makes it hard to compare implementation details from the published product descriptions alone. Before adopting either service, check its current documentation for language-specific instrumentation, ingestion endpoints, authentication, quotas and export paths. Honeycomb’s MCP support is a named integration for agents; New Relic’s OpenTelemetry support is the clearest stated route for bringing telemetry into its platform.
04Open source, self-hosting and lock-in
Neither vendor publishes an open-source licence or self-hosting option for these products. Both are presented as web-based observability platforms, so plan around using a vendor service rather than deploying the observability backend in your own infrastructure. Ask each vendor about data residency, export formats, retention, deletion and what happens to stored telemetry when you leave.
OpenTelemetry support gives both products a standard instrumentation path, and Honeycomb explicitly describes itself as OpenTelemetry-native. That can reduce dependence on a vendor-specific instrumentation layer, but it does not make queries, dashboards, alerts or stored data automatically portable. Inventory those assets before migration and confirm whether you can export raw telemetry in a format your next backend can ingest. Treat the effort to rebuild analysis workflows as a separate switching cost.
Questions people ask
Is New Relic or Honeycomb cheaper?
It depends on how your team and telemetry scale. New Relic Standard starts at $10 monthly for its first full-platform user, with additional user and ingest charges. Honeycomb Pro starts at $150 per 50M events. Compare your expected users, ingest volume, events and metrics against each plan’s limits.
Do New Relic and Honeycomb support OpenTelemetry?
Both list OpenTelemetry support. New Relic’s homepage names OpenTelemetry among its integrations, while Honeycomb describes its platform as OpenTelemetry-native. The vendor's site does not specify SDK languages or ingestion rate limits, so verify those details in the vendors’ current documentation.
Which platform is better for AI observability?
Both include AI monitoring. New Relic highlights monitoring model and agent interactions, behavior and costs. Honeycomb describes tracing multi-agent conversations, LLM calls, token costs, latency and failures. Choose based on whether you need AI monitoring within a broad observability platform or production tracing and investigation for AI workflows.
Can I self-host New Relic or Honeycomb?
Neither vendor publishes a self-hosting option for these products. Both are presented as web-based platforms. If self-hosting, data residency or direct control of stored telemetry is a requirement, ask the vendors about deployment choices and data export before adopting either service.