# Maple vs Honeycomb

Honeycomb and Maple both take OpenTelemetry in, put traces at the center, charge nothing per seat and let an agent query your data over MCP. Honeycomb bills per event and is built for asking new questions of wide, high-cardinality spans. Maple bills per GB, adds session replay and an error inbox on every plan, and publishes its source with a version you can run yourself. Below: where the two diverge, where Honeycomb is ahead, and what the same month costs on each.

## Where Maple and Honeycomb differ

Every cell is a sentence. The gutter says who has the edge on that row; rows where both tools do the same thing are collapsed into one line at the end.

### Where they differ

| Topic | Maple | Honeycomb | Edge |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Source code | On GitHub under FSL-1.1, converting to Apache 2.0 two years after each release. | Closed. Refinery, the sampling proxy, is Apache 2.0; the platform itself is not published. [7] | Maple |
| Self-hosting | Yes, on every plan. The whole platform on your own infrastructure, your own ClickHouse, retention you set. | Enterprise only. Honeycomb Private Cloud runs single-tenant in your own AWS account, managed by Honeycomb or by you. [3] | Maple |
| Local development | One binary with an embedded ClickHouse. `maple start` on a laptop, no containers, no account. | Cloud only. Local work still sends events to a real environment, with an API key in your shell. | Maple |
| Frontend and mobile | Session replay tied to backend traces, web analytics from the browser SDK, and a Swift SDK. On every plan. | Frontend Observability for web, iOS and Android, sold as an Enterprise add-on. Core Web Vitals and traces from the browser, no session replay. [4] | Maple |
| Error workflow | Exceptions become issues with an owner, a state, a severity and comments, each linked to its trace. A resolved issue that fires again reopens. | Error analysis ships inside Frontend Observability. Backend exceptions are span events you query, group and alert on; there is no issue with an owner or a state. [4] | Maple |
| Pricing model | $39 a month with 100 GB per signal included, then $0.30 per GB. Bytes are the meter, so a wide span costs more than a narrow one. | Per event: every span, log record, span event and link counts as one, up to 1 MB and 2,000 attributes each. Pro is $3.00 per million events in fixed tiers from $150 for 50M to 750M, with metric data points included at five per event. [2] | Even |
| Cost controls | Overage caps per signal and usage alerts in the billing settings. At a cap the ingest gateway rejects that signal until the billing cycle resets. | No overage bill. Burst protection forgives days above twice the daily target; a second month over the tier gets ten days' notice, then events are throttled. [1] | Even |
| AI and agents | A hosted MCP server over the product's own queries, scoped to the org. Investigations run the diagnosis and write up what broke. | Canvas, an AI copilot that runs queries in a notebook, the Honeycomb MCP server and Agent Timeline, included on every plan since July 2026. [2] | Even |

### Where Honeycomb is ahead

| Topic | Maple | Honeycomb | Edge |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Outlier analysis | No automatic outlier comparison. You filter and group by attributes yourself, or ask the agent to. | BubbleUp: select the slow or failing requests on a heatmap and it ranks every attribute by how much it differs from the baseline. It is the reason teams choose Honeycomb. [1] | Honeycomb |
| SLOs | No SLOs. Alerts fire on thresholds over real traffic. | SLOs with burn-rate alerts: 2 on Pro, 100 or more on Enterprise, with a reporting API. [1] | Honeycomb |
| Retention | 30 days on the cloud plan. Longer on Enterprise, and your call when you self-host. | 60 days for events and metrics on every plan, the free one included. Longer as an Enterprise add-on. [1] | Honeycomb |
| Free plan | No free cloud plan: a 14-day trial, then $39 a month. Self-hosting and `maple start` locally are free. | Free forever: 20M events and 100M metric data points a month, unlimited seats, two triggers. [1] | Honeycomb |
| Compliance attestations | SOC 2 and ISO 27001 certification in progress. Maple Cloud runs in the US or the EU (Frankfurt) at the same price, and self-hosting keeps the data in your own audited environment. | SOC 2 Type II audited yearly, ISO 27001 certified hosting, a HIPAA BAA on Pro and Enterprise, and a US or EU region. [5] | Honeycomb |

**Both have:** Distributed tracing · Log management · Metrics and dashboards · Alerting · Kubernetes monitoring · Public API · MCP server for agents · OpenTelemetry ingest

## The same month, billed twice

A reference workload priced on both at list price. Change the sliders underneath for your own numbers.

**Reference workload:** Spans / mo 100 M · Log records / mo 100 M · Metric data points / mo 500 M

| Maple | Amount |
| --- | --- |
| Startup plan: 100 GB per signal included | $39 |
| Team seats: No per-seat fees | Free |
| **Total** | **$39** |

| Honeycomb | Amount |
| --- | --- |
| Events: 200M spans + logs × $3.00/M | $600 |
| Metrics: 500M data points (5 per event included) | Free |
| Team members: Unlimited seats | Free |
| **Total** | **$600** |

$561 less per month on Maple

List prices checked September 2026. Sources at the foot of the page. Maple pricing based on the Startup plan ($39/mo with 100 GB included per signal (logs, traces, metrics), then $0.30/GB, billed per signal), metered on uncompressed (decoded OTLP) bytes. Honeycomb is modeled on the 2026 Pro rate, $3.00 per million events from $150 for 50M, with metric data points included at five per event. Pro is sold in four fixed tiers up to 750M and the estimate prices the exact volume instead of the next tier up; span events and links, which Honeycomb also counts as events, are not modeled. Both favor Honeycomb. Legacy Pro plans at $1.30 per million run until December 31, 2026. The Maple estimate converts at 1 KB per span or log record and 0.1 KB per metric data point; wide events shift the ratio toward Honeycomb.

Interactive calculator: https://maple.dev/compare/honeycomb#calculator

## Moving from Honeycomb

Telemetry moves with one exporter change. Dashboards and alert rules don't cross vendors, so plan those as the real work.

1. **Keep the Collector, add an exporter** Both platforms ingest standard OTLP, so SDKs, auto-instrumentation and semantic conventions carry over unchanged. Add Maple next to the Honeycomb exporter and ship to both until the alerts you care about fire from Maple.
2. **Sample before Maple, not inside it** If Refinery sits in front of Honeycomb today, point a second Collector pipeline at Maple before it. Maple bills bytes, not events, so the sample rate that kept you inside an event tier can usually come down.
3. **Move boards and triggers with one prompt** Boards, triggers and SLOs do not travel over OTLP. Both platforms expose an MCP server: Honeycomb's reads what you have, Maple's creates dashboards and alert rules. Connect an agent to both and ask it to port everything.

```yaml
# otel-collector.yaml. Add Maple as a second exporter, run both, then drop the first.
exporters:
  otlphttp/honeycomb:
    endpoint: https://api.honeycomb.io:443
    headers:
      x-honeycomb-team: ${env:HONEYCOMB_API_KEY}
  otlphttp/maple:
    endpoint: https://ingest.maple.dev
    headers:
      x-maple-ingest-key: ${env:MAPLE_INGEST_KEY}

service:
  pipelines:
    traces:
      exporters: [otlphttp/honeycomb, otlphttp/maple]
    logs:
      exporters: [otlphttp/honeycomb, otlphttp/maple]
    metrics:
      exporters: [otlphttp/honeycomb, otlphttp/maple]
```

## Common questions

### Is Honeycomb open source? Can I self-host it?

The platform is closed source. Refinery, its tail-sampling proxy, is Apache 2.0. Enterprise customers can run Honeycomb Private Cloud, a single-tenant deployment in their own AWS account. Maple's source is on GitHub under FSL-1.1, converts to Apache 2.0 two years after each release, and self-hosts on any infrastructure, on any plan, with your own ClickHouse.

### How is Maple different from Honeycomb?

Honeycomb is a query engine for wide events: BubbleUp, heatmaps and SLOs make it very good at finding why a slice of requests is slow. Maple covers the same traces, logs and metrics and adds what Honeycomb leaves out or sells as add-ons: session replay, an error inbox with owners and states, open source code, self-hosting and a local binary. Honeycomb is ahead on outlier analysis, SLOs, retention and its free plan.

### Which is cheaper, Honeycomb or Maple?

At the reference workload Maple is, because Honeycomb's 2026 Pro rate is $3.00 per million events and a span with 1 KB of attributes is a lot of events per GB. The gap narrows as spans get wider: Honeycomb charges the same for a 50 KB span as a 1 KB one, while Maple charges for the bytes. Honeycomb's free plan is also free, and Maple Cloud is not. The receipts above run both rate cards on the same month.

### Does Maple have BubbleUp?

Not as a one-click feature. Maple lets you filter and group spans by any attribute, and its MCP server lets an agent do the comparison for you, but nothing ranks every attribute against a baseline automatically the way BubbleUp does. If that workflow is how your team debugs, weigh it.

### Does Honeycomb support OpenTelemetry?

Yes. Honeycomb ingests OTLP over gRPC and HTTP from any Collector or SDK, in the US or the EU. Because both sides speak OTLP, moving is an exporter change and the instrumentation stays as it is.

## Where the Honeycomb claims come from

Vendor facts on this page link to the vendor's own pages and carry the month they were last checked. If one is stale, tell us.

1. [Honeycomb pricing](https://www.honeycomb.io/pricing), checked September 2026
2. [Honeycomb: 2026 Pro plan changes](https://docs.honeycomb.io/get-started/honeycomb/2026-pro-plan-changes), checked September 2026
3. [Honeycomb Private Cloud](https://docs.honeycomb.io/get-started/honeycomb/private-cloud), checked September 2026
4. [Honeycomb for Frontend Observability](https://www.honeycomb.io/platform/frontend-observability), checked September 2026
5. [Honeycomb: compliance and data privacy](https://docs.honeycomb.io/security-compliance/compliance-data-privacy/), checked September 2026
6. [Honeycomb: OpenTelemetry Collector](https://docs.honeycomb.io/send-data/opentelemetry/collector/), checked September 2026
7. [Refinery on GitHub](https://github.com/honeycombio/refinery), checked September 2026

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