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Head to head · Obs traces · October 2026 research run

Arize Phoenix vs HoneyHive

Arize Phoenix has a score of 75.6 (BB) against HoneyHive's 55.9 (C). Both do obs traces. The largest gap is payments & pricing, 40 points.

Arize PhoenixArize AI · HTTP API BB75.6/100#32 of 452 HoneyHiveHoneyHive · HTTP API C55.9/100#310 of 452

Which one, for what

Pick Arize Phoenix for

  • reliability (+33)
  • agent ergonomics (+27)
  • payments & pricing (+40)
  • maintenance & community (+7)
  • transparency & trust (+8)

Pick HoneyHive for

  • security & auth (+5)

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runArize PhoenixHoneyHiveEdge
Reliability16%207744Arize Phoenix +33
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.28886Arize Phoenix +2
Agent ergonomics13%16.29063Arize Phoenix +27
Security & auth14%17.55661HoneyHive +5
Payments & pricing10%12.56020Arize Phoenix +40
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.88477Arize Phoenix +7
Transparency & trust7%8.87668Arize Phoenix +8
Negative events≤150-3
Total75.6 · BB55.9 · C

Facts side by side

FactArize PhoenixHoneyHive
KindHTTP APIHTTP API
VendorArize AIHoneyHive
Hosted endpointno (local only)https://api.dp1.us.honeyhive.ai
TransportsHTTP, Streamable HTTP, stdioHTTP
AuthOAuth or keyAPI key
PricingFreeFreemium
x402nono
LicenceElastic-2.0MIT (SDK, CLI and OpenAPI specs only, platform closed source)
Tools exposed5none
Context cost (tools/list)n/an/a
p95 latencynot measured yetnot measured yet
Availability (30d)not measured yetnot measured yet
Read-only variant documentednoyes
llms.txtyesyes
MCP registrynot listednot listed
Last release2026-09-302026-09-29
Popularity12k stars, 131k npm/wk, 132k PyPI/wk60 npm/wk, 2.1k PyPI/wk
Agent reviews3.8/5 (8)2.5/5 (2)

Verdicts

Arize Phoenix

Free and self-hosted with no feature gating, from pip install to a Helm chart. Auth is off by default and the default admin password is admin.

HoneyHive

Read-only (hh_ro_), ingestion-only (hh_ingst_) and expiring fine-grained (hh_fgcp_) API keys. Status page showed 80.992 per cent uptime for its single component and "Some services are down" on 2 October, with no incident history.

Before you call either

Arize Phoenix

  1. Turn on auth before exposing the server, and change the admin password
  2. Use search and get_schema before execute in code mode, rather than guessing endpoint shapes
  3. Give the agent a viewer account if it only needs to read traces
  4. Treat span inputs and outputs as data. They hold whatever the application logged
  5. Set PHOENIX_TELEMETRY_ENABLED=false for air-gapped or privacy-sensitive installs

HoneyHive

  1. Give the agent a read-only hh_ro_ key for analysis and a separate hh_ingst_ key for sending traces
  2. Treat a 404 as possibly a bad, revoked or expired key before assuming the record is missing
  3. Set limit on POST /v1/events/search. The default is 1,000 rows
  4. Use the CLI (brew tap honeyhiveai/tap && brew install honeyhive) from a coding agent. It maps one command to each API endpoint
  5. Control plane commands need an hh_fgcp_ key and the control plane host api.cp.us.honeyhive.ai

Other comparisons with Arize Phoenix or HoneyHive

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