Helicone vs SGLang

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.

SGLang is a free, open-source inference framework for serving large language, vision-language and diffusion models. It targets agentic workloads, reinforcement-learning rollouts and large-scale serving, from one GPU to distributed clusters. Runtime features include RadixAttention, prefix caching and multi-GPU parallelism. Listed optimizations include disaggregated prefill and decode, speculative decoding, a zero-overhead scheduler and optimized GPU kernels. Supported models include DeepSeek, Qwen, GPT-OSS, Llama, Mistral and GLM. SGLang works with Hugging Face and OpenAI APIs and exposes OpenAI-compatible endpoints. It installs with pip or Docker and supports self-hosted deployment. Hardware support spans NVIDIA and AMD GPUs, Google TPUs, Intel GPUs and CPUs, Apple Silicon, Huawei Ascend NPUs and Moore Threads GPUs. SGLang Diffusion adds image and video generation. The Apache-2.0 license permits open-source use.