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Honeycomb Enterprise vs New Relic comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Feb 8, 2026

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
3.9
Honeycomb Enterprise boosts debugging speed, customer satisfaction, and cost efficiency, enabling operational scaling with reduced staffing needs.
Sentiment score
6.2
New Relic users see improved efficiency, faster issue resolution, reduced downtime, and positive ROI despite premium costs.
Honeycomb Enterprise played a vital role in identifying the problems in the initial calls itself. That has actually saved us a lot of incidents.
Technical Lead at CloudBolt Software
The biggest return on investment with Honeycomb Enterprise is being able to find, if I am doing production support and something goes wrong, the exact scenario or the exact request and response and the details of that really quickly.
Software Engineer at a non-tech company with 501-1,000 employees
There is return on investment because since we reduced the downtime, we can definitely save a lot of money within that period.
System engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees
There is a definite return on investment for New Relic, as we would not have invested in building its infrastructure if there were no returns.
senior software at Norton Lifelock
After implementing New Relic, we have decreased staffing requirements while saving time and money.
Senior Observability Engineer I at a computer software company with 51-200 employees
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
3.5
Honeycomb Enterprise has generally positive customer service, but users face difficulties with technical queries and uneven support experiences.
Sentiment score
7.4
New Relic's support is rated positively for quick responses, professionalism, and effective assistance, despite occasional delays.
When I was looking at Honeycomb Enterprise support with Go Lambdas, it was a little tricky to find someone who could help me answer the question.
Software Engineer at a non-tech company with 501-1,000 employees
If I drop an email to them, they will respond quickly to my email.
Senior DevOps Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Customer support from New Relic is very good, and we rarely need to create support tickets.
senior software at Norton Lifelock
They are very polite and helped him out.
Cloud Engineer at TO THE NEW Digital
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
5.8
Honeycomb Enterprise efficiently supports scalable organizations with effective data management, though some users see room for pricing improvement.
Sentiment score
7.7
New Relic scales well with diverse infrastructures, is generally cost-effective, but has some limitations with specific integrations like Kubernetes.
When you send traces, you will get the complete view of the life of the code and how it has been executed.
Technical Lead at CloudBolt Software
Honeycomb Enterprise scales best when all the products in the company use it because it allows tracing outside of individual products to see how they interact.
Software Engineer at a non-tech company with 501-1,000 employees
That is being used for at least eight thousand hosts.
Lead Engineer at Qualys
We currently use New Relic for tens of thousands of developers and hundreds of teams within our organization, and we have not encountered any scalability issues.
senior software at Norton Lifelock
It is also suitable for cloud native architectures, SaaS, or software as a service, and for high volume data ingestion also.
Cloud Engineer at TO THE NEW Digital
Regarding New Relic's scalability, it excels at the enterprise level for cloud integrations that can utilize tags.
Senior Observability Engineer I at a computer software company with 51-200 employees
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.3
Honeycomb Enterprise is praised for stability but faces mixed reviews due to integration issues and occasional tracing problems.
Sentiment score
7.9
New Relic is reliable and stable, handling heavy data well, although it requires familiarity with occasional performance issues.
They could not get proper tracing with Honeycomb Enterprise at that time.
Lead Engineer at Qualys
In terms of stability and availability, this is an impressive one.
Customer Support Engineer at a insurance company with 10,001+ employees
I measure Honeycomb Enterprise's stability and reliability by its ability to handle high traffic without delays in query results.
Software Engineer at cmc
New Relic lags sometimes.
Cloud Engineer at TO THE NEW Digital
New Relic is stable based on my experience, as I have not seen any problems with the UI.
Contingent Worker at a retailer with 10,001+ employees
 

Room For Improvement

Users request better documentation, pricing, AI features, a streamlined UI, tool integration, and improved microservices support for Honeycomb Enterprise.
New Relic faces criticism for complex interfaces, limited data retention, high pricing, and inefficient configuration impacting user experience.
Rather, it must be treated as a powerful supplementary tool that augments the existing code security solutions (such as Snyk or Checkmarx) in a DevSecOps or Secure DevOps environment.
CEO at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees
The main thing is that I think everything should very hard aim for the direction of being AI compatible because every engineer, or most engineers now use AI to code.
Software Engineer at a financial services firm with 11-50 employees
That is what performance engineers and SREs need to see for each request, where it spent the entire time; how many other services or databases it interacted with and what took more or less time.
Lead Engineer at Qualys
If they could improve the customer support by reducing their SLA within three to five days, if they could remediate everything, that will be so much helpful.
System engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees
Using real-time data, if there are any malicious patterns or something happening, they can identify those.
Platform Software Engineer 4 at Nexthink
Because of the pricing model, organizations have experienced uncontrolled costs and were not able to afford New Relic.
Senior SRE Engineer at SentinelOne
 

Setup Cost

New Relic offers varied pricing based on features and usage, with some high costs but essential capabilities for enterprises.
In terms of pricing, it was a little challenging to get the company to commit to the full pricing of Enterprise, but once we got there it was nice.
Software Engineer at a non-tech company with 501-1,000 employees
Considering the features New Relic offers, the pricing or cost setup has not been a blocker for our budget.
senior software at Norton Lifelock
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for synthetic monitoring is that minions used to cost a lot.
DevOps engineer at a tech company with 5,001-10,000 employees
As we talk about pricing, it is not that much cheaper.
Senior Site Reliability Engineer at a tech vendor with 501-1,000 employees
 

Valuable Features

Honeycomb Enterprise excels in real-time monitoring, scalability, and cost-effective observability, enhancing service management and streamlining operations.
New Relic offers real-time performance monitoring, analytics, and integration features, enhancing application performance and client satisfaction.
We get alerts into Slack, and they work great. We see a lot of metrics go through into Slack, and they are really useful for keeping our team focused on only seeing one place to see alerts.
Software Engineer at Invevo
The most valuable feature of Honeycomb Enterprise for me is the root cause analysis part because it helps me greatly with the response messages and derived error messages which are very clearly mentioned in Honeycomb Enterprise logs.
Customer Support Engineer at a insurance company with 10,001+ employees
Honeycomb Enterprise is so important for me because it serves as an innovative observability platform.
Software Engineer at cmc
Using New Relic speeds up troubleshooting and resolution, giving us a clearer picture of where issues are, thus saving time and effort.
Head of API at a marketing services firm with 11-50 employees
New Relic is very useful for teams that don't have much of a dedicated DevOps team but want to have observability for their platform, and it's an easy way to get started.
Senior SRE Engineer at SentinelOne
New Relic has positively impacted our organization by reducing errors, improving performance, and saving time.
senior software at Norton Lifelock
 

Categories and Ranking

Honeycomb Enterprise
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
18th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
5.5
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
AI Code Assistants (8th), AI Observability (18th)
New Relic
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
4th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
175
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (9th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (9th), IT Operations Analytics (3rd), Mobile APM (2nd), Cloud Monitoring Software (3rd), AIOps (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Honeycomb Enterprise is 1.1%, down from 1.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of New Relic is 3.7%, down from 6.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
New Relic3.7%
Honeycomb Enterprise1.1%
Other95.2%
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

MukeshSharma - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Engineer at Qualys
Tracing microservices has exposed gaps in visibility but has provided high-cardinality insights
I have used better tools, I would say. I would not say that I prefer Honeycomb Enterprise as much. I have used Dynatrace, and I found it more comprehensive, and AppDynamics and other tools. These tools can also provide good information, but I find other tools better. Most of the products, I would say, such as Dynatrace or AppDynamics or New Relic, are targeting this microservices market. I think Honeycomb Enterprise can have something very dedicated for microservices because there is an explosion in the migration from monolithic to microservices. If Honeycomb Enterprise can create a stable solution which is easy to use and which gives additional value and helps for faster debugging with microservices, they can certainly gain market share from others. Tracing is already there. I just wish that these tools are a bit less cryptic. These tools sometimes get quite cryptic for new users. The less cryptic they can be made, that can help these tools. Another thing is that for microservices, when you have multiple microservices installed, that is also required. There are tools where you install on a single microservice, but then these microservices interact with multiple microservices. That kind of picture, I have seen that in AppDynamics; they do give a picture showing that a particular request which arrived here had interaction with these other third-party services or microservices and databases. That is what we need. That is what performance engineers and SREs need to see for each request, where it spent the entire time; how many other services or databases it interacted with and what took more or less time, and if there is a sequence, it should highlight that also. Was it parallel or if, for instance, a call to service A and then a call was made to a database, or a call to service A and a database were in parallel, that kind of information.
BasilJiji - PeerSpot reviewer
System engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees
Real-time alerts have reduced server outage impact and support fast incident response
In the dashboard, if they could show a little more metrics regarding the application and related things, that would be how New Relic could be improved. Currently, there are things showing from the server level and application level, but it can be improved. That is what I felt. Regarding user interface, I do not feel much concern, but for some kind of issues when we are trying to get support from the New Relic team, their SLA seems to be long. They are taking seven to ten working days for resolving some kind of scenario or issue. That is a bit difficult for us. If they could improve the customer support by reducing their SLA within three to five days, if they could remediate everything, that will be so much helpful. When it comes to the customer support part, I felt they need to be a little more improved on that part. The support overall is good, but they can improve. That is the reason I have given it eight out of ten.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Outsourcing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise8
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business65
Midsize Enterprise51
Large Enterprise79
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Honeycomb.io?
If any particular issue is going to take half an hour for root cause analysis, by just getting the error code, particular HTTP status codes or response error messages, we can pinpoint the issues wi...
What is your primary use case for Honeycomb.io?
I was using Honeycomb Enterprise for checking the logs and for application purposes when we were trying to find bugs and errors in a particular application. We used Honeycomb Enterprise for HTTP st...
What advice do you have for others considering Honeycomb.io?
I have read about Honeycomb Enterprise's query engine and the visualization part, which is very interesting. However, those decisions were made by the top leads, so I am not part of that decision. ...
Any advice about APM solutions?
There are many factors and we know little about your requirements (size of org, technology stack, management systems, the scope of implementation). Our goal was to consolidate APM and infra monitor...
What needs improvement with New Relic Insights?
While I appreciate many aspects of New Relic, I believe the product could improve in some areas—specifically, some advanced capabilities can have a learning curve for new users, and the licensing a...
What is your primary use case for New Relic Insights?
Since I'm a performance engineer, I typically use New Relic day-to-day for investigating any performance bottlenecks identified during our performance testing of any application. I look at the resu...
 

Also Known As

Grit
New Relic Browser, New Relic Applied Intelligence, New Relic Insights, New Relic Synthetics, New Relic Servers, New Relic APM
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Clover Health, Eaze, Intercom, Fender
World Fuel Services, Verizon, FootLocker, McDonald's, Trainline, Mondia Media, Confused, Costa Coffee, Ryanair, Marks & Spencer, William Hill, Delivery Hero, Skyscanner, BASF, DAZN, Veygo, Virtuo, movingimage, talabat, Australia Post, Tokopedia, Seven Network, Virgin Australia, Zomato, BigBasket, Mercado Libre, Lending Club
Find out what your peers are saying about Honeycomb Enterprise vs. New Relic and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
900,747 professionals have used our research since 2012.