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Honeycomb.io vs Prometheus comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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.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
No ranking in other categories
Prometheus
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
8th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
34
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Honeycomb.io is 1.6%, up from 1.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Prometheus is 3.4%, down from 3.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

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.
MuhammadAzhar Khan - PeerSpot reviewer
Free to use and provides valuable monitoring capabilities
Prometheus is a scalable and flexible tool that I can deploy on any cloud platform. It is free to use and provides valuable monitoring capabilities. It allows me to save money by avoiding costs associated with AWS native services like CloudWatch or Amazon Prometheus. The ability to deploy on any cloud platform or environment, including Kubernetes, is a major advantage.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"The resilience of the solution's metric collection is very nice."
"The product is easy to maintain."
"The good thing is it integrates well with the Grafana dashboard. It comes with a UI where you see everything as a graph."
"The sky is the limit because the solution is a flexible open box that can be used vastly to do anything you need to monitor applications."
"The most valuable features of Prometheus for metrics collection and monitoring are its stability, robustness, and rich set of features."
"Prometheus is a great solution for monitoring."
"Prometheus is a scalable and flexible tool that I can deploy on any cloud platform."
"Prometheus is an open-source product that helps mold and improve it per our requirements. It is a lightweight solution that gives you many different metrics you can use in your application. The product offers complete granularity of your infrastructure. It integrates seamlessly with other tools like Grafana, which offers dashboard visibility. Prometheus is an extensively used product. I haven't seen any organization that is not using it."
 

Cons

"The process of log scraping gets delayed on Honeycomb.io. At times, it gives false alerts to the application team."
"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 would like to see improvement in the analysis tools and customization features."
"There is a need for a more comprehensive overview of exporters, especially when dealing with many of them."
"They could provide efficient logs in terms of clarity and ease of access similar to Datadog’s paid version."
"The scalability must be improved."
"Prometheus has a learning curve when setting it up. It definitely requires a little bit more hands-on than other solutions. It is an open source solution which means you do need to go through and read the literature that they have online for setting it up. The setup could be made easier."
"The primary area where Prometheus could be improved is in terms of pricing, particularly when used with managed services."
"If you are not quite technical, it can be pretty hard to understand the way it works and how to query data in Prometheus."
"Prometheus can definitely improve its visualization. For example, the matrices represented in Prometheus do not have a very good visualization on their dashboard."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"The tool is open-sourced."
"Prometheus is an open-source solution."
"The price of Prometheus is good, it is affordable because it is open source and there is no cost to it. You put it on your own server and the costs incurred completely depend on how you set it up."
"This is an open-source solution."
"We use the solution's open-source version."
"The product is free."
"We have the open-source version, so we don't pay for it."
"My company uses the open-source version of the product."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Healthcare Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
26%
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Honeycomb.io?
The solution's initial setup process was straightforward since we were getting enough support from Honeycomb.io's team.
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 do you like most about Prometheus?
The most valuable feature of Prometheus is its ability to collect metrics.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Prometheus?
Prometheus is cost-effective for me as it is free. Using cloud-native alternatives like Amazon Prometheus would incur charges.
What is your primary use case for Prometheus?
I use Prometheus for monitoring purposes in IT infrastructure. It is particularly useful for environments using Kubernetes, as it monitors ports, containers, instances, and applications effectively.
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Clover Health, Eaze, Intercom, Fender
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Honeycomb.io vs. Prometheus and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
838,640 professionals have used our research since 2012.