Our take
Pick Grafana if observability teams who will stay on Cloud Free at $0 always (usage limits, 14-day retention) while they open a first dashboard, then buy Pro from $19 / month + usage (platform fee $19 includes 10k active series) or Enterprise from $25,000 / year. 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 at
hosted observability-query desk
Best for
Grafana Time series you edit at $0
Honeycomb Wide-event queries you start at $0
Free plan
Grafana $0 · always. No charges ever. All Grafana Cloud services with usage limits. 14-day retention for metrics, logs, traces, profiles, and k6. Community support. Adaptive Telemetry and AI Assistant on the Free benefits
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
Grafana Pro $19
Honeycomb Refinery as a Service $0.10
Next step up
Grafana
Honeycomb Pro $150/mo
Runs where
Grafana Hosted
Honeycomb Hosted
Watch out
Grafana Free retention is 14 days
Honeycomb Free is 20M events and 2 Triggers
Last checked
Grafana 2026-10-23 · grafana.com/pricing
Honeycomb 2026-10-23 · honeycomb.io/pricing
observability teams who will stay on Cloud Free at $0 always (usage limits, 14-day retention) while they open a first dashboard, then buy Pro from $19 / month + usage (platform fee $19 includes 10k active series) or Enterprise from $25,000 / year.
Read the Grafana 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