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 Triggers, and 2 SLOs.
Read the Honeycomb pageHoneycomb vs Rootly
Our take
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 Triggers, and 2 SLOs. Pick Rootly if on-call teams who will buy Incident Response at $20 / user / month, then add On-Call at another $20 when they want Rootly to own the roster.
Best for
Honeycomb Wide-event queries you start at $0
Rootly Incidents you pay per user
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
Rootly No free plan
Lowest paid
Honeycomb Refinery as a Service $0.10
Rootly Incident Response $20/user/mo
Next step up
Honeycomb Pro $150/mo
Rootly Startup discounts (“<100 employees / <$50m raised / <5 years”; “pay what you can <25 employees”) print as a form, not a dollar. $50
Runs where
Honeycomb Hosted
Rootly Hosted
Watch out
Honeycomb Free is 20M events and 2 Triggers
Rootly $20 is per user per product
Last checked
Honeycomb 2026-10-23 · honeycomb.io/pricing
Rootly 2026-10-23 · rootly.com/pricing
Which one, then?
Pick Rootly if
on-call teams who will buy Incident Response at $20 / user / month, then add On-Call at another $20 when they want Rootly to own the roster.
Read the Rootly page