Helicone vs LLM Gateway

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.

LLM Gateway provides one OpenAI-compatible API for routing requests among more than 250 models from over 40 providers. If a provider errors, times out, or rate-limits a request, it can retry up to twice with another provider for the same model. Its dashboard tracks request, token, spend, latency, error, and cache metrics, with model and provider breakdowns. Teams can use their own provider API keys without a platform fee and pay providers directly. The open-source core is licensed under AGPLv3 and can be self-hosted for free; enterprise features require a license. The Free plan is free, billed free forever, and has a 5% fee on credit usage. It includes 200+ models across 40+ providers, activity logs and export, and 20 requests per minute on free models; paid models are not rate limited. Enterprise pricing is custom and not listed. It includes custom routing, unlimited data retention, a 99.9% uptime SLA, and 24/7 priority support. Published integration guides cover tools including Claude Code, Cursor, Codex CLI, Cline, n8n, and VS Code.