Helicone vs Portkey
Helicone
helicone.aiPortkey
portkey.aiSide by side
| Figure | Helicone | Portkey |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $79/mo | $49/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 4 | 3 |
| Spec score · Llm Developer Tools | 8.1 (#9) | 8.0 (#12) |
| Spec score · Llm Monitoring | 8.1 (#13) | 7.9 (#16) |
| Spec score · AI LLM Observability Tools | 8.2 (#13) | 8.0 (#17) |
| Compliance | Helicone states that its cloud is SOC 2, HIPAA, and GDPR compliant. | The Enterprise plan lists SOC 2 Type 2, GDPR, and HIPAA under advanced compliance, along with custom BAAs and data isolation. |
| Observability | Helicone visualizes multi-step LLM interactions, logs requests in real time, and helps identify error root causes. | Portkey offers logs, traces, feedback, metadata, filters, and alerts for AI activity. |
| Routing | The platform provides smart load balancing, automatic failovers, and response caching across providers. | The gateway supports configurable routing, failovers, retries, and load balancing across models. |
| Support | The pricing page lists community support through GitHub and Discord. | The Free plan lists community support, Production lists production support, and Enterprise lists dedicated onboarding and priority 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.
Portkey
Portkey is a platform for managing, observing, and governing generative AI across teams. Its gateway offers a unified API for models and providers across modalities, with configurable routing, failovers, retries, and load balancing. Monitoring tools include logs, traces, feedback, metadata, filters, and alerts; prompt management adds templates, a playground, API endpoints, versioning, and variables. Listed integrations include OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini, Azure, Amazon Bedrock, and Ollama, as well as agent frameworks including CrewAI, LangChain, LangGraph, and the OpenAI Agents SDK. The gateway offers simple and semantic caching for repeat requests. Security features include virtual provider keys, access controls, inbound IP and geographic rules, and sensitive-data redaction. Self-hosted and local deployment options are listed, while Enterprise adds private cloud deployment and VPC hosting. Developer is free and includes 10k recorded logs/month, 3 days log retention, and 30 days metrics retention. Production costs $49 a month, billed $49/month, with 100k recorded logs/month and production support. Enterprise pricing is custom. Portkey lists San Francisco as its headquarters and March 2023 as its launch date.