Helicone vs Routerly

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.

Routerly is a self-hosted gateway for directing application requests to AI providers, tracking usage costs, and applying budgets. Its routing engine can use up to nine configurable policies, covering model choice, cost, provider health and performance, capability and context, budgets, rate limits, and fairness. It supports OpenAI and Anthropic wire formats, including streaming, so compatible clients can connect by changing the base URL. Listed providers include OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini, Ollama, Mistral, Cohere, xAI, and custom HTTP endpoints. Per-token costs can use built-in pricing presets or custom model prices. Budgets can measure cost, calls, or token usage globally, per project, or per token, over rolling or calendar windows. Projects can have separate bearer tokens, model pools, routing configurations, and budget limits. Routerly stores configuration and usage records in JSON files without requiring an external database. It can be deployed with Docker or an installer. The self-hosted plan costs nothing, carries the AGPL-3.0 license, and adds no markup to API calls.