Helicone vs Orq.ai
Helicone
helicone.ai
Orq.ai
orq.aiSide by side
| Figure | Helicone | Orq.ai |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $79/mo | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 4 | 2 |
| Spec score · LLM Gateway Software | 8.3 (#9) | 7.7 (#18) |
| Spec score · LLM gateways | 8.3 (#12) | 7.9 (#15) |
| Observability | Helicone visualizes multi-step LLM interactions, logs requests in real time, and helps identify error root causes. | Orq.ai provides request traces, cost and token tracking, dashboards, and OpenTelemetry ingestion. |
| Routing | The platform provides smart load balancing, automatic failovers, and response caching across providers. | Smart Router can choose a model by cost and quality strategy, with fallbacks, retries, and load balancing available. |
| Support | The pricing page lists community support through GitHub and Discord. | The pricing page lists email support with priority SLA and a Slack or Teams channel as a Teams add-on; Enterprise includes Slack/Teams support. |
Plans
In their own words
Helicone
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.
Orq.ai
Orq.ai is an AI gateway and platform for routing, governing and observing requests to models and tools. Through an OpenAI-compatible API, it lists more than 500 models from over 30 providers. Smart Router can select models by cost or quality strategy, with fallbacks, retries and load balancing. Controls include budgets, spend limits, guardrails and PII redaction. Observability covers request traces, cost and token tracking, dashboards and OpenTelemetry ingestion. Integrations include OpenAI and Anthropic APIs, Python and Node SDKs, remote MCP servers, Azure AI Foundry, Vertex AI and compatible endpoints. It supports Claude Code, Cursor, Codex and more than 25 agent frameworks. Deployment options are EU SaaS, VPC and on-premises. Orq.ai says prompts, outputs and traces are not used to train models, and lists EU residency and retention controls. Pay-as-you-go is free, usage-based, with provider-rate model charges and stated allowances.