For about $20 to $30 a month, both Airbrake and Honeybadger will catch your app's errors and email you when something breaks. Both are aimed at small teams, and at a glance they look interchangeable. What you get on top of the errors is where they part ways.
Airbrake adds measurement: response times, percentiles and an Apdex score for every route, collected by the same notifier that reports your errors. Honeybadger adds storage: a log and event store called Insights, plus uptime checks and a status page, even on its free plan. So when part of an app gets slow, the two tools notice in different ways. Airbrake flagged my slow search and price routes by their 95th percentile with no setup. Honeybadger only flagged a slow checkout query because my app had logged a warning about it.
That split runs through the rest of this comparison. Airbrake knows how your routes perform, and shows you the rest as raw JSON. Honeybadger knows more about each error, the user and the request behind it, and leaves performance to whatever your app writes down.
Each section below compares one job, from setup and grouping to debugging, triage, regressions, performance, logs, AI and price, and ends with a verdict. The results come from my own hands-on tests in October 2026.
| Job | Better in my test | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Signing up | Honeybadger | A free plan; Airbrake asks for a card before the trial starts |
| Capturing errors | Tie | Both caught every planted error, uncaught promise included |
| Grouping | Tie, for different reasons | Airbrake merged two crashes by message; Honeybadger merged four request failures by location |
| Error detail | Honeybadger | Labelled user fields, request body and breadcrumbs; Airbrake shows raw JSON |
| Search and breakdowns | Airbrake | 27 filter keys with N of M counts and over 20 aggregations per group |
| Triage | Honeybadger | Assignees, merge and resolve on deploy; Airbrake resolves, mutes or deletes |
| Regressions | Honeybadger | Resolve on deploy is opt-in; Airbrake's default reopened every error |
| Performance | Airbrake | Route percentiles and Apdex out of the box; Honeybadger has no request timing |
| Logs and events | Honeybadger | Insights with BadgerQL; Airbrake stores no logs |
| Price | Honeybadger | Free plan with uptime and logs; Airbrake starts at $19 for one user |
Both tools watched monitoring-lab, a small online bookshop whose bugs I planted myself. It's an Express API backed by SQLite, with a flaky price service and a report job that errors once a minute. Each tool hooks in through a small adapter file, so they received identical failures from identical code:
Shoppers called alice, bob and carol came from a traffic script. I released 1.0.0, resolved the coupon crash, then released 1.1.0 with the bug still in place. For Honeybadger, I also connected the browser SDK and shipped a third version that slowed checkout and added a payment error. Where a section covers a feature I didn't run in Airbrake, such as its browser notifier, I say so.
Notes on the setup:
@honeybadger-io/js 6.17.0.Airbrake wanted a card before activating its 30-day trial:
Card details are part of creating the account, which matches the credit card requirement on Airbrake's pricing page. Once in, its notifier sent errors and request timings straight away. My data landed in a project called "Monitoring", while a default "First project" sat empty, which confused me for a minute.
Honeybadger has a free Developer plan, so you can start without paying. Its setup page shows your API key inside the code snippet and waits for the first error. One setting caught me out: Honeybadger ignores the "development" environment by default, so nothing arrived from my local server until I set reportData: true. The setup page mentions it, but it's easy to skim past.
Verdict: Honeybadger. A free plan beats a card form, and its one gotcha is documented.
Both tools caught every planted error on the server, including the promise rejection nobody catches. They grouped them by different rules, and each rule merged something it shouldn't have.
Airbrake groups by a message pattern. My two crashes both read "Cannot read properties of undefined", with only the property name changing, so Airbrake normalized them into one group. Its Aggregations tab is where you find out:
The message values split 13 for title and 10 for discount, from two different files and lines. That's two bugs in one row, and Airbrake has no split or merge controls, so the row stays that way.
Honeybadger groups by error class and the location in the code. My two crashes come from different lines, so they stayed separate. Its rule tripped on the storefront instead:
Every failed storefront request, a tracking 404, a checkout 500, a book 500 and a price 502, throws ApiError from the same helper line, so all four landed in one group whose title changes to the latest failure. Unlike Airbrake, Honeybadger has a Merge action, though I didn't find a split.
The same rules also had upsides. Airbrake's message pattern folded every run of my report job, "run #3", "#4" and so on, into one group. Honeybadger's location rule kept a new payment error in one group across every failed amount. Each tool's rule helps or hurts depending on how your code throws, and both merged different problems in my app. Test grouping against your own errors before trusting the counts.
Verdict: a tie. Each merged a different set of problems, and Honeybadger's Merge action gives you slightly more control.
Neither tool showed source code for server frames. Airbrake stopped at server.js:81:45, without a function name, and a field buried in its raw data gave the reason: it fetches source over the network and can't read file:// paths. Honeybadger gave server.js:150:45 behind a [PROJECT_ROOT] prefix, again with no code.
Browser errors fared better in Honeybadger: maps sent through its API with the ordinary project key turned the minified trace into src/api.js, with the surrounding lines shown. I didn't test Airbrake's browser notifier.
This is where the two differ most. Honeybadger shows who hit the error and what they sent, in labelled sections:
user_email and user_id read carol, and Params hold her request body, book 8 with the coupon save10. An "Email user" button sits right there if you want to contact her.
Airbrake keeps the same kind of information in raw JSON. Here's the data my code attached to a handled out-of-stock error:
The book ID and breadcrumbs sit near the top, but the shopper's email is further down, mixed alphabetically with operating system and process details. The user never gets a labelled field; you find them in the Context JSON or the Users aggregation. Airbrake's Overview does add one number Honeybadger lacks: the error rate of the route, such as "11.76% error rate from 85 requests to this route: POST /checkout".
Honeybadger recorded browser breadcrumbs automatically, clicks, page changes and every request, and kept server breadcrumbs with their own request:
Each entry is labelled by type, with selectors on clicks and URLs on requests. On one server error, though, a notice from 51 seconds earlier slipped into the list, so the request scoping isn't perfect.
Airbrake showed my breadcrumbs only because I sent them as a parameter, and they appeared as JSON:
"checkout started" and "book found" are nested objects with timestamps, with no timeline view. No native breadcrumb panel appeared for my Node errors.
Both tools caught the uncaught promise rejection. In Airbrake, it arrived with a single frame and nothing marking it as unhandled, so it looks like any other error in the list.
Verdict: Honeybadger. Labelled user fields, the request body and a readable breadcrumb list make each error faster to understand. Airbrake's route error rate is useful, and the rest is JSON.
Neither tool showed the code behind a server crash, and neither could connect a failed browser request to the server error that caused it. Better Stack connects every error to what surrounds it. Open "View related" on an exception and you get that request's logs, its spans, connected errors, its release and recordings of the visitor's browser session:
Pick any option and it's already filtered to that one request, which neither Airbrake's JSON nor Honeybadger's separate error rows can do.
Airbrake is the stronger tool for slicing errors. Its search offers 27 filter keys as chips, from User and Version to Route and Message param, and each result shows how many of a group's occurrences match:
carol accounts for "5 of 16" out-of-stock errors and "4 of 23" crashes, so you see one customer's share at a glance. Inside a group, Aggregations slices the occurrences more than 20 ways. The filters are chips only, so typed queries like route:/check didn't match anything.
Honeybadger's error list takes a search query, and its default view filters with -is:resolved -is:ignored. I didn't test its search beyond that. Its bigger strength here is Insights, which the logs section covers.
Verdict: Airbrake. For "who is affected and on which version", its filters and aggregations answer faster than anything in Honeybadger's error list.
Honeybadger gives each error an assignee picker and a resolve toggle right in the list, and the error page adds Ignore, Resolve on Deploy, Merge, Export, Share URL and "Copy for LLM". Resolving is a status switch:
"Resolved. We'll alert you if this error happens again." There's no option to resolve for a specific version.
Airbrake's triage is thinner. Resolve is one click with an Undo, and the list's only bulk action is Resolve:
You can mute, delete and comment in Markdown, but there's no assignee, priority, snooze or merge.
Verdict: Honeybadger. Assignees and merge matter as soon as more than one person works the list.
Both tools learn about releases from deploy reports. I sent deploys to each tool through its API. Honeybadger's list shows each one with a Compare link:
Compare opens a GitHub diff between two revisions, which needs matching tags in your repository.
Both tools can resolve every open error when a deploy arrives, so errors that keep happening come back as new. The difference is the default.
In Airbrake, it's switched on out of the box:
"Resolve all errors in environment after a deploy" was enabled before I'd changed anything. In Honeybadger, "Resolve errors on deploy" is off until you turn it on in project settings, and you can also use it on a single error with the Resolve on Deploy button.
I resolved the coupon crash, then shipped the next version unfixed.
In Honeybadger, with resolve on deploy still off, only the coupon crash reopened. Its status went back to Unresolved with "after deploy 1.1.0" in the location line:
Nothing in the list marked the row as reopened, and the History tab left the return out entirely. You can only tell from timestamps.
In Airbrake, the deploy had already resolved four other errors, and all four happened again, so every group came back, five in all. The crash group showed a count since the deploy:
"46 (23 since last deploy)" is all you get, and since the group mixes both crashes, only Aggregations reveals which bug actually came back. The deploy's own page then reported "Fixed errors 0", while the activity feed said the same deploy was "resolving 4 errors".
Later, I turned on Honeybadger's setting for its third release. It cleared every server error, as Airbrake does, but only in the environment the deploy named. My browser reports a different environment, so I needed a second deploy call to clear browser errors too.
Verdict: Honeybadger. Its defaults reopened only the bug I'd resolved, and its resolve on deploy is there when you want it. Airbrake's default turns one regression into five reopened groups.
Honeybadger's History tab never recorded the reopen, and Airbrake's activity feed didn't either. Better Stack wrote it down. The coupon crash's row turned to a red "Reoccurred", and its activity feed laid out the sequence:
"Error reoccurred", "resolved the error" and "Error appeared", each with a time. Releases came straight from the SDK, so there were no deploy calls to send and no setting resolving errors behind my back.
Airbrake measures every route the notifier sees, with no extra setup:
After one traffic run, it already showed 270 requests, a 0.92 Apdex, 239 ms average response and a 10% error rate. The routes table, sorted by the 95th percentile, put my two slow endpoints on top:
GET /search at 1.90 s and GET /prices/:id at 1.70 s are highlighted orange, exactly where I'd planted the slowness. The detail stops at the route, though. Opening /search showed an empty time breakdown and no queries, and there are no traces. My trial listed performance retention as 7 days.
Honeybadger has no request timing. When my third release made checkout several seconds slower, two features hinted at it. Breadcrumbs carry times relative to the error:
"checkout started" at 2.96 s before the error and "book found" at 0.55 s before leaves a 2.4 s gap around the book lookup. The other hint came from Insights, covered next.
Verdict: Airbrake. It measures every route on its own, while Honeybadger only shows what you happen to log.
Honeybadger includes Insights, a store for logs, events and error notices that you query with a language called BadgerQL. Because my code writes a warning for each slow query, one query grouping warnings by text and revision did the job:
44 "slow query: SELECT book for checkout" warnings and 36 "payment gateway slow to respond, retrying" warnings, all from version 1.2.0, point straight at the cause. Insights also summed my custom metrics, such as checkout revenue and order counts, with one query. Two small annoyances: the query box inserts closing brackets and quotes for you, which gets in the way, and capturing the console meant each line was saved twice.
Airbrake has no logs product. Its plan options list only Error Monitoring and Performance Monitoring:
Dev, Basic and Pro packages differ in users, teams and extras like audit logs, and none adds logs.
Verdict: Honeybadger. Insights turns your logs into answers, and it's included in every plan.
Airbrake knew which routes were slow without knowing why, and Honeybadger spotted the slow query only thanks to my own log lines. Better Stack measured the request and kept the logs, and both were one click from the same error. "View spans" laid out the failing checkout step by step:
The 2.19 s request spent 1.53 s in the book query. "View logs" then showed that request's lines in Live tail, the slow-query warning included:
Alerts in Airbrake are email settings each user toggles, covering digests, repeat emails for high volume and a production-only switch, plus Slack, Teams, GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, Jira, Pivotal Tracker, Trello and webhooks:
Each column is a toggle, so there are no thresholds, time windows or performance alerts. I found no PagerDuty or Opsgenie in its integration list.
Honeybadger's plans include uptime monitors and a status page, even on Free, and its feature list adds check-ins for scheduled jobs. Airbrake offers none of these. A check-in would have caught my failing report job from the outside. I didn't test any of these, or Honeybadger's alert channels, so I can't rate them.
Verdict: Honeybadger, for including uptime, check-ins and a status page in the same subscription. Test its alerting before you rely on it.
Honeybadger has no built-in AI analysis. A "Copy for LLM" button puts an error on your clipboard for any assistant, and Honeybadger's MCP server lets assistants look up errors and run BadgerQL themselves. I didn't find an AI feature in Airbrake.
Verdict: no real contest, though I tested neither feature. Honeybadger gives you two ways to hand errors to an assistant, and Airbrake gives you none.
Airbrake has no AI, and Honeybadger copies errors for an assistant you bring yourself. Better Stack's AI SRE investigates on its own. Given the slow release to explain, it lined up the two versions' errors, traces and logs by itself:
It found the book query's median jumping from 0.13 ms to 2.6 s, separated that from the new payment failures, and recommended a rollback, all without access to my code. The run took about four minutes and cost $0.49.
These figures come from Honeybadger's and Airbrake's pricing pages on October 26, 2026, plus my trial accounts. Both change, so check before you buy.
| Honeybadger | Airbrake | |
|---|---|---|
| Free plan | ✔: Developer, 1 user, 5,000 errors | ✘: none |
| Free plan extras | 1 uptime monitor, 1 status page, Insights at 50 MB a day | Not applicable |
| Free plan retention | 15 days for errors | Not applicable |
| Trial | 30 days on paid plans | 30 days in my account |
| Card needed | Not stated for the free plan | ✔: required at signup |
| Honeybadger Team | Airbrake Dev | Airbrake Basic | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly price | $26 | $19, errors included | $38, errors included |
| Annual price | $286 a year | About 10% less | About 10% less |
| Users | Unlimited | 1 | Unlimited, 3 teams |
| Errors | 50,000 a month | 25,000 on the first tier | 25,000 on the first tier |
| Error retention | 90 days | 30 days | 30 days |
| Performance | ✘: not offered | Included in my trial | Included in my trial |
| Logs | Insights at 100 MB a day | ✘: not offered | ✘: not offered |
| Uptime monitors | 5, checked every 2 minutes | ✘: not offered | ✘: not offered |
Airbrake's plan prices combine a package with an error tier, and extra errors cost $6.50 per 10,000. Performance came free in my trial, up to 50,000 events kept for 7 days, though today's calculator says 30 days, so ask Airbrake which applies. Honeybadger Business costs $80 monthly, holds errors 180 days and runs uptime checks each minute, while more Insights capacity is sold as a Logging and Performance add-on.
For a team, the gap is wide. Honeybadger's $26 plan covers unlimited users with errors, logs, uptime checks and a status page. Airbrake's equivalent for unlimited users costs $38 and covers errors and route performance. To add traces and on-call on top of all that from one vendor, read our look at Honeybadger against an all-in-one platform.
Verdict: Honeybadger. It's free to start and includes more per dollar, unless route performance is the one thing you need.
| Feature | Honeybadger | Airbrake |
|---|---|---|
| Free plan | ✔: 1 user | ✘: card required |
| Development environment reported | ✘: needs reportData | ✔: by default |
| Grouping rule | Error class and location | Message pattern |
| Merge groups | ✔: available | ✘: not available |
| Server source lines | ✘: file and line only | ✘: file and line only |
| User fields | ✔: labelled, with Email user | ✘: inside raw JSON |
| Breadcrumbs | ✔: readable list | ✘: raw JSON parameter |
| Route error rate on an error | ✘: not shown | ✔: shown |
| Filters with N of M counts | ✘: not offered | ✔: 27 keys |
| Per-group aggregations | ✘: not offered | ✔: over 20 |
| Assignees | ✔: in the list | ✘: not offered |
| Resolve on deploy | Off by default, per environment | On by default |
| Regression shown | ✘: no label or history entry | ✘: count since last deploy |
| Route performance | ✘: not offered | ✔: p50, p95 and Apdex |
| Logs and event queries | ✔: Insights with BadgerQL | ✘: not offered |
| Uptime, check-ins, status page | ✔: included, untested | ✘: not offered |
| PagerDuty | Not tested | ✘: not listed |
| AI | Copy for LLM and MCP server, untested | ✘: none found |
Honeybadger fits a small team after one cheap subscription for errors, logs, uptime and a public status page. Its error pages are easier to read, its triage suits more than one person, and its defaults handle regressions sensibly. You'll need your app to log slow operations if you want Honeybadger to notice them. Our Sentry vs Honeybadger comparison shows how it holds up against a tool that does measure requests.
Go with Airbrake if route performance is what you care about most and you don't want to set up anything to get it. Its percentiles, Apdex, filters and aggregations tell you what's slow and who's affected, faster than Honeybadger can. Turn off resolve-on-deploy if regressions should be visible, and get comfortable reading JSON. How Airbrake's grouping and error pages stack up elsewhere is covered in our Sentry vs Airbrake test and our BugSnag vs Airbrake review.
These two tools spend your $20 to $30 a month on different things. Airbrake buys you measurement, numbers about every route, with error pages that stay close to raw data. Honeybadger buys you breadth, logs, uptime and a status page next to friendlier error pages.
Ask yourself whether your last outage started as a slow page or a dead page. If it was slow, Airbrake would have seen it first. If it was down, Honeybadger's uptime check would have.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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