HoneyHive vs SigNoz
Both are observability & tracing tools. Here is how they actually differ on price, billing model and deployment.
HoneyHive
An OpenTelemetry-based observability and evaluation platform aimed squarely at production AI agents at enterprise scale. Strong free developer tier, then a wall - everything above it is contact-sales with no published rate card.
SigNoz
An open-source Datadog alternative that handles LLM telemetry as part of full-stack observability rather than as a separate product. Free to license, but you are running ClickHouse - the cost is infrastructure and ops, not fees.
| HoneyHive | SigNoz | |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Observability & Tracing | Observability & Tracing |
| Our rating | 4/5 | 4/5 |
| Starting price | Custom (contact sales) | $19/mo (startup) or $49/mo |
| Billing meter | event | gb-ingested |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free self-hosting | No or paid tier only | Yes, free |
| Best for | Teams running agent-heavy production workloads who want tracing, online evaluation, annotation and experiments in one agent-focused system, and who are comfortable with an enterprise sales process rather than self-serve pricing. | Teams that want one observability backend for their whole stack rather than a separate LLM tool, are cost-sensitive relative to Datadog, and either have ClickHouse operational capacity or will pay for cloud. |
Our verdict on HoneyHive
HoneyHive is a genuinely good agent observability platform with a commercial model that will filter out half its potential users before they try it. The product is strong where it counts for agents - OpenTelemetry-based tracing with session replay and multi-agent filtering, and evaluators that run automatically against live production traces rather than only offline datasets. That last capability is the one most tools leave undone, and combined with drift detection, regression alerting and CI/CD integration it forms a coherent quality loop. The free developer tier is honest, giving full features at 10,000 events a month. Above that, there is no published pricing of any kind. Everything is custom and contact-sales. For an enterprise buyer that is normal. For a team trying to compare five platforms on cost before committing engineering time, it is a wall, and it means you cannot know whether HoneyHive is competitive without entering a sales cycle.
Full HoneyHive review →Our verdict on SigNoz
SigNoz is the right answer to a question many teams are actually asking - not "which LLM observability tool" but "how do I see my LLM calls alongside everything else without paying Datadog prices." It handles LLM telemetry as one workload within full-stack observability, giving token-level tracing, per-model cost attribution and prompt latency breakdown, all correlated with the databases and microservices underneath. It is genuinely open source and self-hostable with no feature gating. Two honest caveats. Self-hosted free covers the license and nothing else - you are operating ClickHouse, which is resource-hungry, and you inherit the on-call burden of your own monitoring stack going down. And there is no evaluation capability whatsoever, so if you need LLM-as-judge scoring, datasets or regression testing, SigNoz is half your stack and you will pair it with something like DeepEval or promptfoo.
Full SigNoz review →Frequently Asked Questions
What is the main difference between HoneyHive and SigNoz?
HoneyHive: Teams running agent-heavy production workloads who want tracing, online evaluation, annotation and experiments in one agent-focused system, and who are comfortable with an enterprise sales process rather than self-serve pricing. SigNoz: Teams that want one observability backend for their whole stack rather than a separate LLM tool, are cost-sensitive relative to Datadog, and either have ClickHouse operational capacity or will pay for cloud. Both sit in Observability & Tracing, so the decision usually comes down to billing model and deployment rather than raw capability.
Which is cheaper, HoneyHive or SigNoz?
It depends entirely on your workload shape, because they meter differently - HoneyHive bills on event and SigNoz bills on gb-ingested. Published starting prices are Custom (contact sales) and $19/mo (startup) or $49/mo respectively, but those numbers are not comparable until you apply them to the same traffic. Use our cost calculator to model both against your own request volume and span count.
Can I self-host HoneyHive or SigNoz?
HoneyHive: No or paid tier only. SigNoz: Yes, free. Free self-hosting means no licence fee, not no cost - you still own the infrastructure, upgrades and on-call.