Helicone vs OpenLIT

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.

OpenLIT is an open-source platform for tracing and evaluating LLM activity, managing prompts, and tracking costs. Built on OpenTelemetry, it can capture model calls, tool use, and retrievals, with filters for user, session, cost, latency, and metadata. Evaluations can use an LLM judge, heuristics, or human review on production traffic or experiments. Prompt Hub provides versioning, dynamic variables, API retrieval, unlimited prompt fetching, and AI-assisted improvement. OpenGround supports side-by-side model comparisons for latency, tokens, and cost, including comparisons using a user’s own key. Coding agent monitoring covers sessions, costs, tokens, repository activity, and code impact. The site lists more than 56 integrations across LLMs, agent frameworks, vector databases, and GPUs. OpenLIT accepts OTLP data and can be self-hosted with Docker Compose or Kubernetes Helm. Its Apache 2.0 license and site description note that self-hosting keeps prompts, traces, and secrets in the user’s environment. The OSS plan costs nothing and includes unlimited self-hosted usage, users, projects, and environments.