Helicone vs TrueFoundry AI Gateway
Helicone
helicone.aiTrueFoundry AI Gateway
truefoundry.comSide by side
| Figure | Helicone | TrueFoundry AI Gateway |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $79/mo | $25/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | Yes |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | — | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 4 | 9 |
| Spec score · LLM Gateway Software | 8.3 (#9) | 8.7 (#7) |
| Spec score · LLM gateways | 8.3 (#12) | 8.9 (#6) |
| Spec score · Byok System | 8.3 (#11) | 8.6 (#4) |
| Observability | Helicone visualizes multi-step LLM interactions, logs requests in real time, and helps identify error root causes. | Monitoring covers requests, tokens, cost, latency percentiles, time to first token, inter-token latency and request-level traces. |
| Purpose | Helicone routes, debugs, and analyzes AI applications. | TrueFoundry AI Gateway sits between applications and model providers to manage AI model access, routing, governance, observability, security and cost controls. |
| Routing | The platform provides smart load balancing, automatic failovers, and response caching across providers. | The gateway supports latency-based routing, weighted load balancing and automatic fallbacks to secondary models. |
| Support | The pricing page lists community support through GitHub and Discord. | The listed support options are an in-app chatbot and Discord for Developer, a support portal for Pro, and priority support, SLA and a dedicated Slack channel for Enterprise. |
Plans
TrueFoundry AI Gateway
- DeveloperFree
- DeveloperFree
- Pro$25 a month
- Pro$499 a month
- Pro Plus$2,999 a month
- TrueFoundry Pro (AWS Marketplace)$6,250 a month
- TrueFoundry Enterprise (AWS Marketplace)$12,500 a month
- TrueFoundry On-Prem (AWS Marketplace)$16,666.66 a month
- EnterprisePriced on request
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.
TrueFoundry AI Gateway
TrueFoundry AI Gateway sits between applications and model providers to manage model access, routing, governance, observability, security, and cost controls. Its unified API supports chat, completion, embedding, and reranking models. TrueFoundry says the gateway connects to more than 1,000 LLMs across more than 35 platforms, including OpenAI, AWS Bedrock, Google Vertex AI, Azure OpenAI, and Anthropic. Routing options include latency-based selection, weighted load balancing, and automatic fallbacks. The service tracks token usage, latency, errors, and request volumes, and supports centrally stored request and response logs. Teams can set rate limits and cost or token quotas, with role-based access controls. MCP connections include tools such as Slack, GitHub, Confluence, and Datadog, with policies for tool calls. Deployment includes SaaS, with VPC, on-premises, and air-gapped options for Enterprise. Developer is free; Pro costs $25 a month, billed per user. Developer includes 10,000 requests per user monthly, while Pro includes 20,000 and charges $20 per additional 100,000 requests.