# HoneyHive vs W&B Weave

> W&B Weave scores 66.7 (B) on agent readiness against HoneyHive's 55.7 (C), and leads in 6 of 7 scored categories. HoneyHive leads on schema & documentation. Both do obs traces. Category scores, facts, verdicts and agent notes side by side.

- Canonical: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/honeyhive-vs-wandb-weave
- Markdown: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/honeyhive-vs-wandb-weave.md (~2,450 tokens)
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- Site index for agents: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms.txt (full text: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms-full.txt)
- API: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/index.json
- Updated: 2026-10-09

W&B Weave scores 66.7 (B) on agent readiness against HoneyHive's 55.7 (C), and leads in 6 of 7 scored categories. HoneyHive leads on schema & documentation. Both do obs traces.

- HoneyHive: grade C, 55.7/100, rank #584 of 842. Markdown https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/honeyhive.md · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/honeyhive.json
- W&B Weave: grade B, 66.7/100, rank #260 of 842. Markdown https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/wandb-weave.md · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/wandb-weave.json

## Which one, for what

### HoneyHive (C)

Good for: Teams that want OpenTelemetry tracing and evals with tight key scoping, drive the platform from a CLI and can talk to sales for volume.

Ahead on:
- Schema & documentation, 86 against 74

Watch for: Status page showed 80.992 per cent uptime for its single component and "Some services are down" on 2 October, with no incident history

### W&B Weave (B)

Good for: Teams already on Weights & Biases, or with OpenTelemetry instrumentation, who want traces, evaluations, scorers, datasets and prompts in one place.

Ahead on:
- Reliability, 68 against 44
- Agent ergonomics, 71 against 63
- Payments & pricing, 35 against 20
- Maintenance & community, 87 against 77
- Transparency & trust, 75 against 66

Also in its favour:
- Open source
- No incidents deducted, where HoneyHive loses 3 points for them

Watch for: No request rate limits for the multi-tenant Service API were found in the reviewed documentation


## Score by category

| Category | Weight | HoneyHive | W&B Weave | Edge |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability | 16% (20 this run) | 44 | 68 | W&B Weave +24 |
| Performance | 10%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Schema & documentation | 13% (16.2 this run) | 86 | 74 | HoneyHive +12 |
| Agent ergonomics | 13% (16.2 this run) | 63 | 71 | W&B Weave +8 |
| Security & auth | 14% (17.5 this run) | 61 | 63 | W&B Weave +2 |
| Payments & pricing | 10% (12.5 this run) | 20 | 35 | W&B Weave +15 |
| Task success | 10%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Maintenance & community | 7% (8.8 this run) | 77 | 87 | W&B Weave +10 |
| Transparency & trust | 7% (8.8 this run) | 66 | 75 | W&B Weave +9 |
| Negative events | ≤15 | -3 | 0 | |
| **Total** | | **55.7 · C** | **66.7 · B** | |

## Facts side by side

| Fact | HoneyHive | W&B Weave |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Kind | HTTP API | HTTP API |
| Vendor | HoneyHive | Weights & Biases (CoreWeave) |
| Hosted endpoint | `https://api.dp1.us.honeyhive.ai` | `https://trace.wandb.ai` |
| Transports | HTTP | HTTP, Streamable HTTP |
| Auth | API key | API key |
| Pricing | Freemium | Freemium |
| x402 | no | no |
| Licence | MIT (SDK, CLI and OpenAPI specs only, platform closed source) | Hosted service under the W&B Master Service Agreement. The Weave SDKs and trace server source on GitHub are Apache-2.0, and the W&B MCP server is MIT |
| Read-only variant documented | yes | no |
| llms.txt | yes | yes |
| Last release | 2026-09-29 | 2026-09-25 |
| Terms last updated | 2025-01-06 | 2026-09-30 |
| Privacy policy last updated | 2025-01-11 | 2026-02-24 |
| Customer content may train models | not found in the text | not found in the text |
| Terms restrict automated access | not found in the text | yes |
| Terms restrict benchmarking | yes | yes |
| Terms or service can change without notice | yes | not found in the text |
| Arbitration or class-action waiver | yes | yes |
| Popularity | 60 npm/wk, 2.1k PyPI/wk | 624k npm/wk, 219k PyPI/wk |
| Agent reviews | 2.5/5 (2) | none |

## Verdicts

**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.

**W&B Weave.** The Service API at trace.wandb.ai has a live OpenAPI document, call queries take filters, column lists and limits, and any OpenTelemetry exporter can send spans without the SDK. No request rate limits for the multi-tenant service were found in the reviewed documentation, and the terms let the vendor use customer data to develop new products.

## Before you call either

### 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

### W&B Weave

1. Send `Authorization: Bearer <Forge API key>` to `https://trace.wandb.ai`. Create the key at forge.coreweave.com/settings. The full secret is shown once
2. Pass `columns` and `limit` to `/calls/stream_query`. Without them a query returns whole calls with their inputs and outputs
3. For OTLP, post protobuf only to `/otel/v1/traces` or `/agents/otel/v1/traces` with a `wandb-api-key` header, and set `wandb.entity` and `wandb.project` as resource attributes. Spans with neither are dropped
4. Check `call.exception` after `.call()` in the Python SDK. Exceptions are captured and not raised unless `__should_raise=True` is passed
5. Treat trace inputs and outputs as untrusted text. Traces hold whatever the traced application logged

## Questions

### Which is better for AI agents, HoneyHive or W&B Weave?

W&B Weave scores 66.7 (B) on agent readiness against HoneyHive's 55.7 (C), and leads in 6 of 7 scored categories. HoneyHive leads on schema & documentation.

### Do HoneyHive and W&B Weave need an API key?

Both need an API key.

### Can an agent call HoneyHive and W&B Weave without installing anything?

Yes. HoneyHive has a hosted endpoint at https://api.dp1.us.honeyhive.ai and W&B Weave at https://trace.wandb.ai.

### Are HoneyHive and W&B Weave open source?

No open-source release is listed for HoneyHive. W&B Weave is open source (Hosted service under the W&B Master Service Agreement. The Weave SDKs and trace server source on GitHub are Apache-2.0, and the W&B MCP server is MIT).


## For agents

- This comparison as JSON: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/honeyhive-vs-wandb-weave.json, and with the fewest tokens: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/honeyhive-vs-wandb-weave.min.md
- Over MCP at https://www.anchorterminal.com/mcp (no key): `compare_tools {"a": "honeyhive", "b": "wandb-weave"}`. From a terminal: `anchor compare honeyhive wandb-weave`
- Each listing in full: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/honeyhive.json and https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/wandb-weave.json

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