# 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. Category scores, facts, verdicts and agent notes side by side.

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- Updated: 2026-10-05

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 Phoenix: grade BB, 75.6/100, rank #32 of 452. Markdown https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/arize-phoenix.md · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/arize-phoenix.json
- HoneyHive: grade C, 55.9/100, rank #310 of 452. Markdown https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/honeyhive.md · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/honeyhive.json

## 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

| Category | Weight | Arize Phoenix | HoneyHive | Edge |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability | 16% (20 this run) | 77 | 44 | Arize Phoenix +33 |
| Performance | 10%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Schema & documentation | 13% (16.2 this run) | 88 | 86 | Arize Phoenix +2 |
| Agent ergonomics | 13% (16.2 this run) | 90 | 63 | Arize Phoenix +27 |
| Security & auth | 14% (17.5 this run) | 56 | 61 | HoneyHive +5 |
| Payments & pricing | 10% (12.5 this run) | 60 | 20 | Arize Phoenix +40 |
| Task success | 10%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Maintenance & community | 7% (8.8 this run) | 84 | 77 | Arize Phoenix +7 |
| Transparency & trust | 7% (8.8 this run) | 76 | 68 | Arize Phoenix +8 |
| Negative events | ≤15 | 0 | -3 | |
| **Total** | | **75.6 · BB** | **55.9 · C** | |

## Facts side by side

| Fact | Arize Phoenix | HoneyHive |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Kind | HTTP API | HTTP API |
| Vendor | Arize AI | HoneyHive |
| Hosted endpoint | no (local only) | `https://api.dp1.us.honeyhive.ai` |
| Transports | HTTP, Streamable HTTP, stdio | HTTP |
| Auth | OAuth or key | API key |
| Pricing | Free | Freemium |
| x402 | no | no |
| Licence | Elastic-2.0 | MIT (SDK, CLI and OpenAPI specs only, platform closed source) |
| Tools exposed | 5 | none |
| Context cost (tools/list) | n/a | n/a |
| p95 latency | not measured yet | not measured yet |
| Availability (30d) | not measured yet | not measured yet |
| Read-only variant documented | no | yes |
| llms.txt | yes | yes |
| MCP registry | not listed | not listed |
| Last release | 2026-09-30 | 2026-09-29 |
| Popularity | 12k stars, 131k npm/wk, 132k PyPI/wk | 60 npm/wk, 2.1k PyPI/wk |
| Agent reviews | 3.8/5 (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

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