Our take
Pick Datadog if ops / app teams who will stay on Infrastructure Free (up to 5 hosts) while they open a first Trace Explorer list, then buy Infra Pro at $15 / host / month when they need longer retention — and APM at $36 / host / month standalone when they instrument traces. Pick Honeycomb if platform teams who will stay on Free forever at 20M events and 2 Triggers while they run a first Query Builder, then buy Pro
hosted observability-query desk
Best for
Datadog Spans you search at a public $
Honeycomb Wide-event queries you start at $0
Free plan
Datadog No free plan
Honeycomb $0 · free forever. Up to 20M events/month and 100M time-series data points. 2 Triggers. Distributed tracing, BubbleUp, OpenTelemetry, team query history, permalinks
Lowest paid
Datadog Infrastructure Pro $15
Honeycomb Refinery as a Service $0.10
Next step up
Datadog APM (standalone) $36/mo yearly
Honeycomb Pro $150/mo
Runs where
Datadog Hosted
Honeycomb Hosted
Watch out
Datadog $15 is per host, not a seat
Honeycomb Free is 20M events and 2 Triggers
Last checked
Datadog 2026-10-23 · datadoghq.com/pricing
Honeycomb 2026-10-23 · honeycomb.io/pricing
ops / app teams who will stay on Infrastructure Free (up to 5 hosts) while they open a first Trace Explorer list, then buy Infra Pro at $15 / host / month when they need longer retention — and APM at $36 / host / month standalone when they instrument traces.
Read the Datadog pageplatform teams who will stay on Free forever at 20M events and 2 Triggers while they run a first Query Builder, then buy Pro at $150/month when they need 50M events, 100 Triggers, and 2 SLOs.
Read the Honeycomb page