# Grafana MCP Server vs Honeycomb MCP (slim)

> Grafana MCP Server scores 74.5 (BB) on agent readiness against Honeycomb MCP's 58.3 (C), and leads in 6 of 7 scored categories. Honeycomb MCP leads on security & auth. Both do observability metrics. Category scores, facts, verdicts and agent notes side by side.

- Full: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/grafana-mcp-server-vs-honeycomb-mcp.md (~2,150 tokens) · this version ~830 tokens · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/grafana-mcp-server-vs-honeycomb-mcp.json · canonical https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/grafana-mcp-server-vs-honeycomb-mcp
- Index: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms.txt · API: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/index.json · Updated: 2026-10-09

Grafana MCP Server scores 74.5 (BB) on agent readiness against Honeycomb MCP's 58.3 (C), and leads in 6 of 7 scored categories. Honeycomb MCP leads on security & auth. Both do observability metrics.

- Grafana MCP Server: BB 74.5, rank #69 of 842 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/grafana-mcp-server.min.md
- Honeycomb MCP: C 58.3, rank #527 of 842 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/honeycomb-mcp.min.md
- Grafana MCP Server, good for Teams on Grafana, self-managed or Cloud, that want an agent to read dashboards and query Prometheus, Loki, Tempo and Pyroscope, and to work with alert rules, incidents and OnCall. Ahead on Reliability, 91 against 65; Schema & documentation, 81 against 57; Agent ergonomics, 74 against 53; Payments & pricing, 60 against 30; Maintenance & community, 95 against 61; Transparency & trust, 79 against 68. Also Agent-ready, a grade of BB or better; Runs on your own machine; Open source.
- Honeycomb MCP, good for Agents that investigate latency and error spikes in a team already sending traces and events to Honeycomb, and that record findings as Boards, Triggers or SLOs. Ahead on Security & auth, 71 against 65. Also A hosted endpoint, with nothing to install; No incidents deducted, where Grafana MCP Server loses 3 points for them.

| Category | Grafana MCP Server | Honeycomb MCP |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability (16%) | 91 | 65 |
| Performance (10%) | pending | pending |
| Schema & documentation (13%) | 81 | 57 |
| Agent ergonomics (13%) | 74 | 53 |
| Security & auth (14%) | 65 | 71 |
| Payments & pricing (10%) | 60 | 30 |
| Task success (10%) | pending | pending |
| Maintenance & community (7%) | 95 | 61 |
| Transparency & trust (7%) | 79 | 68 |

| Fact (where they differ) | Grafana MCP Server | Honeycomb MCP |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Vendor | Grafana Labs | Honeycomb |
| Hosted endpoint | no (local only) | `https://mcp.honeycomb.io/mcp` |
| Transports | stdio, SSE (legacy), Streamable HTTP | Streamable HTTP |
| Pricing | Free | Your plan |
| Licence | Apache-2.0 | Proprietary hosted service under Honeycomb's Terms of Service and Honeycomb Intelligence Supplemental Terms. The companion plugin in honeycombio/agent-skill is MIT |
| Tools exposed | 119 | 34 |
| MCP registry | `io.github.grafana/mcp-grafana` | `io.honeycomb/mcp` |
| Last release | 2026-10-07 | 2026-09-29 |
| Terms last updated | no document linked | 2025-05-22 |
| Privacy policy last updated | 2026-07-10 | no date given |
| Customer content may train models |  | not found in the text |
| Terms restrict automated access |  | not found in the text |
| Terms restrict benchmarking |  | not found in the text |
| Terms or service can change without notice |  | yes |
| Arbitration or class-action waiver |  | not found in the text |
| Popularity | 3.5k stars, 152k PyPI/wk | 27 stars |