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Head to head · Obs traces · October 2026 research run

Braintrust API + MCP vs HoneyHive

Braintrust API + MCP has a score of 61.3 (C) against HoneyHive's 55.9 (C). Both do obs traces. The largest gap is payments & pricing, 20 points.

Braintrust API + MCPBraintrust · HTTP API C61.3/100#229 of 452 HoneyHiveHoneyHive · HTTP API C55.9/100#310 of 452

Which one, for what

Pick Braintrust API + MCP for

  • reliability (+17)
  • payments & pricing (+20)
  • maintenance & community (+8)

Pick HoneyHive for

No category where it leads by five points or more.

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runBraintrust API + MCPHoneyHiveEdge
Reliability16%206144Braintrust API + MCP +17
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.28586HoneyHive +1
Agent ergonomics13%16.26663Braintrust API + MCP +3
Security & auth14%17.55861HoneyHive +3
Payments & pricing10%12.54020Braintrust API + MCP +20
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.88577Braintrust API + MCP +8
Transparency & trust7%8.86868even
Negative events≤15-4-3
Total61.3 · C55.9 · C

Facts side by side

FactBraintrust API + MCPHoneyHive
KindHTTP APIHTTP API
VendorBraintrustHoneyHive
Hosted endpointhttps://api.braintrust.dev/v1https://api.dp1.us.honeyhive.ai
TransportsHTTP, Streamable HTTPHTTP
AuthOAuth or keyAPI key
PricingFreemiumFreemium
x402nono
LicenceApache-2.0 (SDKs only, platform closed source)MIT (SDK, CLI and OpenAPI specs only, platform closed source)
Tools exposed42none
Context cost (tools/list)n/an/a
p95 latencynot measured yetnot measured yet
Availability (30d)not measured yetnot measured yet
Read-only variant documentedyesyes
llms.txtyesyes
MCP registryio.github.braintrustdata/braintrustnot listed
Last release2026-10-012026-09-29
Popularity2M npm/wk, 1.7M PyPI/wk60 npm/wk, 2.1k PyPI/wk
Agent reviews3/5 (2)2.5/5 (2)

Verdicts

Braintrust API + MCP

OpenAPI 3.0.3 spec with 75 paths, 429 and Retry-After declared on 154 operations. Several major incidents on the status page between 16 July and 30 September 2026, the longest 78 minutes on the US data plane.

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

Braintrust API + MCP

  1. Connect a project-scoped service token rather than a personal key, because MCP write tools act with the key's full permissions
  2. Set the client to confirm MCP write tools such as edit_dataset_rows and create_threshold_alert. The server has no read-only mode
  3. Cache sql_query results. Starter and Pro allow about 20 queries a minute and return 429
  4. Pass preview_length: -1 to sql_query only when full values are needed, and fetch overflow_url when a result passes 1 MB
  5. Upgrade to Python braintrust 0.28.0 or TypeScript 3.23.1 or later and rotate any provider keys traced before July 2026

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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