Helicone vs LiteLLM

Helicone routes, debugs, and analyzes AI applications through a gateway and observability tools. The gateway provides access to more than 100 models through the OpenAI SDK by changing the model name, and supports load balancing, automatic failovers, and response caching across providers. Helicone logs requests in real time and visualizes multi-step LLM interactions to help locate error causes. Listed integrations include OpenAI, Anthropic, Azure, LiteLLM, Anyscale, Together AI, and OpenRouter. It can run in customer infrastructure through single-click deployment or a production-ready Helm chart; Helicone also states that its cloud is SOC 2, HIPAA, and GDPR compliant. A LangGraph integration tracks calls, sessions, performance, and costs, while an API cost calculator covers more than 300 models and providers. The free Hobby plan includes 10,000 requests, 1 GB storage, one seat, one organization, and seven days of retention. Pro costs $79.00 per month. A seven-day trial is advertised. Helicone says its services remain live in maintenance mode following acquisition by Mintlify, with security updates, new models, and bug and performance fixes continuing.

LiteLLM is an open-source AI gateway and LLM proxy for platform teams. It provides one OpenAI-compatible API to 140+ providers and 1,800+ models, with load balancing, lowest-cost routing and automatic selection of cheaper models for simple prompts. Teams can track usage and spend across keys, users, teams, organizations, tools, agents and MCP, then apply hard budgets and rate limits. Response and semantic caching can use Redis, S3 or GCS. LiteLLM can be self-hosted, including in air-gapped environments, and offers deployment through an official Helm chart or Terraform module. The maker says self-hosting has no telemetry and keeps data within the user's infrastructure. Listed security features include hardened non-root images, vulnerability scanning, SSO/JWT/RBAC controls and secrets-manager integrations. The free Open Source plan is self-hosted and includes 100+ providers, virtual keys, budgets, rate limits, fallbacks, logging and Prometheus metrics. A 30-day Enterprise trial key is available without a credit card.