Our take
Pick groundcover if platform teams who will stay on Free at $0 (BYOC, 12-hour retention, Slack community, no card) while they open a first Traces list, then buy Pro at $30 / host / month when they want SSO and standard retention. 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 $150/month when they need 50M events, 100
hosted observability-query desk
Best for
groundcover EBPF traces you keep in your cloud
Honeycomb Wide-event queries you start at $0
Free plan
groundcover $0 · bYOC. 12-hour data retention. Slack community support. No credit card
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
groundcover Pro $30
Honeycomb Refinery as a Service $0.10
Next step up
groundcover On Premise $50
Honeycomb Pro $150/mo
Runs where
groundcover Hosted
Honeycomb Hosted
Watch out
groundcover Free retention is 12 hours
Honeycomb Free is 20M events and 2 Triggers
Last checked
groundcover 2026-10-23 · groundcover.com/pricing
Honeycomb 2026-10-23 · honeycomb.io/pricing
platform teams who will stay on Free at $0 (BYOC, 12-hour retention, Slack community, no card) while they open a first Traces list, then buy Pro at $30 / host / month when they want SSO and standard retention.
Read the groundcover 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