Opik vs HoneyHive
Both are observability & tracing tools. Here is how they actually differ on price, billing model and deployment.
Opik
Comet's open-source LLM observability and eval platform - the cheapest paid cloud in the category at $19/mo, and the most permissive OSS license. Apache-2.0, full feature set self-hosted, and the fastest-growing project of its peers.
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.
| Opik | HoneyHive | |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Observability & Tracing | Observability & Tracing |
| Our rating | 5/5 | 4/5 |
| Starting price | $19/mo | Custom (contact sales) |
| Billing meter | span | event |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free self-hosting | Yes, free | No or paid tier only |
| Best for | Teams that want a genuinely feature-complete open-source observability platform, or the cheapest managed cloud, without a license or feature-gate catch | 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. |
Our verdict on Opik
The most honest open-source deal in the category - Apache-2.0, the full feature set self-hosted with no gates, and if you want managed, the cheapest cloud tier here at $19/mo. It is also the fastest-growing project of its peers, which tells you the market agrees. The one real watch-out is per-seat pricing - it scales poorly as your team grows, and a few large-project users report UI slowdown.
Full Opik review →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 →Frequently Asked Questions
What is the main difference between Opik and HoneyHive?
Opik: Teams that want a genuinely feature-complete open-source observability platform, or the cheapest managed cloud, without a license or feature-gate catch 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. Both sit in Observability & Tracing, so the decision usually comes down to billing model and deployment rather than raw capability.
Which is cheaper, Opik or HoneyHive?
It depends entirely on your workload shape, because they meter differently - Opik bills on span and HoneyHive bills on event. Published starting prices are $19/mo and Custom (contact sales) 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 Opik or HoneyHive?
Opik: Yes, free. HoneyHive: No or paid tier only. Free self-hosting means no licence fee, not no cost - you still own the infrastructure, upgrades and on-call.