# Last9 vs Honeycomb: A Honeycomb Alternative Without Sampling

> Last9 vs Honeycomb compared on AI and MCP, where the AI runs, trace sampling, ingest-time control, metrics and logs coverage, pricing, and deployment in your own cloud, with where each one fits.

Source: https://last9.io/compare/honeycomb/

Both are OpenTelemetry-native and both are built for high-cardinality data. Honeycomb is organised around wide events, explores traces fast, and bills per event, with sampling as the main way to hold that bill down. Last9 keeps every trace, covers metrics, logs, and traces on one licence, and runs its AI agent on your model provider.

- **Gartner Cool Vendor 2025:** Named a Gartner® Cool Vendor in AI for SRE and Observability, cited for its unified telemetry platform.
- **Your model, your cloud:** The Last9 agent runs on your model provider, with no per-investigation charge, in your own cloud account.
- **One licence:** No meter counting every span, and no plan tier to unlock your own cloud. The infrastructure runs on your own cloud bill.

## Last9 vs Honeycomb at a glance

The questions engineering teams ask when they compare the two.

| | **Last9** | **Honeycomb** |
|---|---|---|
| Does it have an MCP server for coding agents? | ✓ Yes, hosted, since March 2025, for any MCP client. An agent can act through it: add drop rules and edit dashboards | ✓ Yes, and a broad one: read tools across schema, queries, BubbleUp, traces, boards, triggers, and SLOs, plus write tools that create and update boards, triggers, SLOs, and recipients. None of them reach ingest rules, and there are no delete tools |
| Does it have an AI SRE agent? | ✓ Yes. The Last9 agent investigates in the app, in Slack, and in your IDE, and builds a diagnosis dashboard from what it finds | ✓ Yes. Canvas is an AI-guided workspace inside the product, and Agent Skills give Claude Code and Cursor knowledge of instrumentation and investigation. Automated investigations are early access |
| Can the AI use our model provider, in our own cloud? | ✓ Yes. The Last9 agent runs on your model provider or inference endpoint, in your own cloud account, with no per-investigation charge | Not documented. Honeycomb Intelligence runs in Honeycomb's own service, with no published option to point it at your own model provider |
| Can it monitor LLM apps and coding agents? | ✓ Yes. Agents Monitoring reports conversations, tokens, cost, latency, and success rate from OpenTelemetry GenAI telemetry, with a separate view for coding agents | For LLM apps, yes: Agent Timeline lays out a conversation across traces, with LLM calls, tool calls, failures, and token use, on every plan. Honeycomb documents no view of what your coding agents do and cost |
| Is trace data sampled? | ✓ No. Every trace is kept. You decide what to drop or aggregate, with rules you preview against live data | Usually, and it is the main cost lever. Refinery does trace-aware tail-based sampling so you keep every error trace and a fraction of the rest. It is a cluster your team sizes and runs |
| Can I filter telemetry before I pay to store it? | ✓ Yes, from one place. The Control Plane drops, remaps, redacts, forwards, and aggregates metrics, logs, and traces at ingest, from the UI | Yes, in several places you operate. Refinery samples, collector processors filter, and the Telemetry Pipeline add-on on Enterprise filters, samples, redacts, and extracts metrics from logs |
| Does it cover metrics, logs, and traces equally? | ✓ Yes. Metrics, logs, and traces are first-class, with PromQL and LogQL over them and APM built from the same OpenTelemetry data | Traces and wide events are the centre of the product. Logs are stored as events against the same allotment, and metrics became generally available in March 2026 |
| How is it priced? | One licence. The infrastructure runs on your own cloud bill, at your negotiated rates | ✓ Published plans, billed per event, where every span and log record counts and a 150-span trace is 150 events. A free plan and a published Pro rate, with unlimited seats, and a quote above the Pro ceiling |
| Can it run in our own cloud account? | ✓ Yes. Last9 runs in your own cloud account, on AWS or GCP in any region, and manages it for you | ✓ Yes. Private Cloud runs the same platform in your own AWS account, operated by Honeycomb or by your team, and is listed on the Enterprise plan |

## An AI agent that investigates, on your model

- **Last9:** One assistant in the app, in Slack, and in your IDE through MCP. It investigates, builds a diagnosis dashboard, and hands you the link.
- **Last9:** The production agent, Last9, responds to pages with context from Slack, Linear, and PagerDuty. It runs on your model provider or inference endpoint and picks the model for each step. Customer data is never used for training.
- **Last9:** An agent can do more than read. Through MCP it can add a drop rule and stop ingesting the noisy source it found.
- **Honeycomb:** Honeycomb has invested heavily here. Its MCP server is broad, with write tools for boards, triggers, SLOs, and recipients, and it can hand a question to Canvas. Agent Skills teach Claude Code and Cursor how to instrument and investigate, and Agent Timeline shows conversations, tool calls, and token use.
- **Tradeoff:** The difference is scope and where it runs, not whether either has an agent. Honeycomb's write tools stop at boards, triggers, SLOs, and recipients; Last9's reach drop rules, so an agent can change what is collected. Several of Honeycomb's newest AI features are early access. Compare both on your own incidents.

## Every trace, instead of a sample of them

- **Last9:** Last9 applies no sampling. Every trace stays available for an investigation, and you decide what to drop or aggregate with rules you write and preview against live data.
- **Last9:** Drop, remap, redact, forward, and aggregate metrics, logs, and traces at ingest, from the UI, in one place rather than a separate mechanism per signal.
- **Honeycomb:** Refinery is open source, trace-aware, and good at what it does: keep every error trace, keep a fraction of the healthy ones, and weight query results by sample rate so counts stay representative. Events sampled out before they arrive do not count against your allotment.
- **Tradeoff:** Sampling is a real answer to volume, and weighting keeps the aggregates honest. The cost lands later, on the odd request nobody predicted: a trace sampled away is not there when you go looking for it. Refinery is also a cluster your team sizes, runs, and tunes.

## High cardinality, counted differently

- **Shared:** This is not a row where one of us is built for high cardinality and the other is not. Honeycomb was founded on the idea, states no cap on unique values per column, and counts metrics as data points rather than attribute combinations. Both platforms expect per-customer and per-tenant labels.
- **Last9:** Labels like customer_id or tenant stay on the metric, with no hard cardinality limit and no charge per label or metric name. 20M series per metric per day by default, with higher limits on request.
- **Honeycomb:** Events-based metrics work differently from time series: each distinct combination of attributes produces more events, and every event counts toward the monthly allotment.
- **Matters most for:** What differs is the unit you pay in. Honeycomb bills by event, so span depth and request rate set the tier. Work out your events per month before comparing either platform on price.

## Your cloud, and one licence

- **Last9:** Last9 runs single-tenant in your own cloud account, on AWS or GCP in any region, and manages it for you, including the AI. Deployment, upgrades, and on-call are ours.
- **Last9:** Every feature is on one licence: distributed tracing, profiling, custom metrics, custom dashboards, alerting, and RBAC, with forward deployed engineers on your account.
- **Honeycomb:** Private Cloud runs the same platform in your own AWS account, either operated by Honeycomb or by your team, single-tenant or multi-tenant. It is listed on the Enterprise plan, and the SaaS service runs in a US or EU location.
- **Matters most for:** This is the closest deployment match of any platform we get compared to, so it is not the reason to switch. Worth asking both vendors which regions are supported and what plan it needs.

## Which one fits your team?

**Choose Last9 if:**
- You want every trace kept, rather than a sampling policy deciding which ones survive
- You want metrics, logs, and traces as equals, with PromQL and LogQL over all of them
- You do not want the bill to move with how many spans each request produces
- You want an AI agent that investigates on your own model provider, and an MCP server whose write access reaches drop rules
- You want one place to drop, remap, and aggregate at ingest, without running a sampling proxy yourself

**Choose Honeycomb if:**
- Your work centres on exploring wide events and traces, and BubbleUp is how your team debugs
- You want a free plan and a published rate you can model before talking to anyone
- You already run Refinery, or you want trace-aware tail-based sampling that keeps every error trace
- Agent Timeline, Agent Skills, and write tools for boards, triggers, and SLOs cover what you need from AI

## Moving off Honeycomb

What the switch involves, and what Last9 does for you.

- **Forward deployed engineers:** A Last9 engineer runs the move with your team, including your boards, triggers, and SLOs.
- **Keep your instrumentation:** Honeycomb is OpenTelemetry-native and so is Last9, so services already sending OTLP need only a new exporter endpoint. Services still on the older Beeline libraries move to OpenTelemetry first.
- **Boards and triggers get rebuilt:** Queries written in Honeycomb's Query Builder do not convert mechanically, because the data model is a different shape. Boards, triggers, and SLOs are rebuilt as PromQL and LogQL, and the Last9 agent does that work with your team.
- **Run both:** Add a second OTLP exporter and send the same data to both platforms while you validate. Keep Refinery in front of Honeycomb until the cutover, then retire it, and compare what full-fidelity traces look like next to the sampled ones.

## The objections we hear most

Each one is a fair reason to hesitate.

### Honeycomb pioneered high-cardinality observability. Is that not its strength over Last9?

It is a genuine strength, and this is not a row where one of us handles high cardinality and the other does not. Honeycomb states no cap on unique values per column and counts metrics as data points rather than attribute combinations. Last9 supports 20M series per metric per day by default, with higher limits on request. The difference is the unit you pay in and how much raw data you keep, not whether the labels work.

### BubbleUp and the Query Builder are excellent for finding what is different about a slow request.

They are, and teams who spend their day exploring traces rate them highly. Last9 takes a different route: metrics, logs, and traces together, with PromQL and LogQL, a query builder, and an agent that investigates in the app, in Slack, and in your IDE. Which fits depends on whether your debugging starts from wide events or from metrics and logs side by side.

### Honeycomb has a free plan and publishes its Pro rate. Last9 does not.

That is true and worth weighing. Honeycomb bills per event, so a 150-span trace is 150 events, and request rate and span depth decide your tier rather than GB. Above the Pro ceiling it is a quote, as Last9 is. Work out your monthly event count first, because that number, not the rate card, is what decides the comparison.

### Honeycomb Private Cloud already runs in our own AWS account.

It does, and this is the closest deployment match of anything we are compared to. Honeycomb runs the same platform there, operated by its team or yours. Last9 runs single-tenant in your own account on AWS or GCP and manages it, including the AI. Honeycomb lists Private Cloud on its Enterprise plan, so ask both vendors what tier and which regions apply to you.

### Is Last9 proven at our scale?

Last9 regularly handles 500M+ events a minute and 60M+ concurrent users, and has monitored 12 of the world's 20 largest streaming events. It is SOC 2 Type II certified and PCI ready, with SSO and access controls. Teams across fintech, healthcare, gaming, media, and commerce run it in production, including Replit, Pine Labs, Tata 1mg, and Housing.com.

## FAQ

### Is Last9 a good Honeycomb alternative?

Honeycomb is built around wide events and trace exploration, bills per event, and relies on sampling to hold volume down. Last9 keeps every trace, covers metrics, logs, and traces on one licence, applies drop and aggregate rules at ingest from one place, and runs its AI agent on your model provider. Honeycomb fits better if BubbleUp and wide-event exploration are how your team debugs, or you want a free plan and a published rate.

### How does Last9's MCP server compare with the Honeycomb MCP server?

Both read and write, so this is not a read-versus-read-only difference. Honeycomb's is broad on the read side, and its write tools create and update boards, triggers, SLOs, and notification recipients, with no delete tools and an explicit write scope on the key. Last9's hosted MCP server, available since March 2025, works with any MCP client such as Claude Code or Cursor, and its write access also reaches drop rules, so an agent can change what is ingested.

### How does Last9's AI compare with Honeycomb Canvas?

Canvas is Honeycomb's AI-guided workspace, and Agent Skills teach Claude Code and Cursor how to instrument and investigate. Several of its newest AI features are early access. The Last9 agent investigates in the app, in Slack, and in your IDE, runs on your model provider or inference endpoint inside your own cloud account, and has no per-query or per-investigation charge.

### How does Last9 billing compare with Honeycomb pricing?

Honeycomb bills per event, where every span and log record counts and a trace with 150 spans is 150 events, so request rate and span depth set your tier rather than gigabytes. It publishes a free plan and a Pro rate, with unlimited seats, and quotes above the Pro ceiling. Last9 is one licence that covers every feature, with the infrastructure on your own cloud bill at your negotiated rates. Work out your monthly event count before comparing the two.

### How does Last9 compare with Honeycomb sampling?

Sampling is Honeycomb's main cost lever. Refinery, its open source tail-based proxy, keeps every error trace and a fraction of the healthy ones, weights query results by sample rate so counts stay representative, and runs as a cluster your team sizes and tunes. Last9 applies no sampling: every trace is kept, and you decide what to drop or aggregate with rules you preview against live data.

### Is there a Honeycomb alternative that runs in our cloud account?

Honeycomb Private Cloud runs the same platform in your own AWS account, operated by Honeycomb or by your team, and is listed on its Enterprise plan, while its SaaS service runs in a US or EU location. Last9 runs single-tenant in your own cloud account, on AWS or GCP in any region, and manages it for you, including the AI. This is the closest deployment match of any comparison on this site.

### Can Last9 replace Honeycomb APM?

Honeycomb builds its service view from traces and wide events, with BubbleUp to find what sets slow requests apart. Last9 covers service discovery, dependency maps, database and external calls, Apdex, exceptions, and trace correlation, from OpenTelemetry, as part of the platform, with metrics and logs alongside the traces rather than stored as events against the same allotment.

### Can Last9 run alongside Honeycomb?

Yes. Both are OpenTelemetry-native, so a second OTLP exporter sends the same data to both while you compare them on your own incidents. Keep Refinery in front of Honeycomb until you cut over, and look at what the full-fidelity traces show next to the sampled ones.

### How do I migrate from Honeycomb to Last9?

Services already sending OTLP need only a new exporter endpoint, and services still on the older Beeline libraries move to OpenTelemetry first. Queries built in Honeycomb's Query Builder do not convert mechanically, because the data model is a different shape, so boards, triggers, and SLOs are rebuilt as PromQL and LogQL. A Last9 engineer does that work with your team.