HELM vs Inspect AI
HELM
crfm.stanford.eduInspect AI
inspect.aisi.org.ukSide by side
| Figure | HELM | Inspect AI |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | — |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | — |
| Plans published | 1 | 1 |
| Spec score · LLM Evaluation Tools | 8.3 (#7) | 7.4 (#19) |
| Spec score · AI LLM Evaluation Tools | 8.4 (#12) | 7.5 (#22) |
| Founded | 2022 | 2024 |
| Purpose | HELM is an open-source Python framework for holistic, reproducible, and transparent evaluation of foundation models, including language and multimodal models. | Inspect is an open-source framework for evaluating large language models across coding, agentic tasks, reasoning, knowledge, behavior, and multimodal understanding. |
Plans
In their own words
HELM
HELM is an open-source Python framework for evaluating foundation models, including large language and multimodal systems. It supplies standardized datasets and benchmarks such as MMLU-Pro, GPQA, IFEval, and WildBench, with a unified interface for models from providers including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. Evaluations can examine accuracy, efficiency, bias, and toxicity, and can include custom metrics, LLM-as-a-judge checks, safety evaluations, and human review workflows. Users can configure private checkpoints or model servers, run inference locally, or send requests to an API. A web interface displays individual prompts and responses, while leaderboards compare models and benchmarks across areas such as medicine, finance, multilinguality, and world knowledge. HELM can reproduce published evaluation results and documents commands for running benchmarks, summarizing results, and starting a local server. It is free, Apache-2.0 licensed, and entered maintenance mode on June 1, 2026.
Inspect AI
Inspect AI is a free, open-source, self-hosted framework for evaluating large language models. It covers coding, agentic tasks, reasoning, knowledge, behavior, and multimodal understanding. Evaluations combine datasets, solvers, and scorers, with more than 200 pre-built evaluations available. Inspect View provides web-based monitoring and visualization, while a VS Code extension supports log browsing, task execution, debugging, and option configuration. The framework has built-in support for more than 20 model providers and local inference through Hugging Face, vLLM, and SGLang. Documented provider groups include OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, AWS Bedrock, Azure AI, Ollama, and others. Standard tools cover web search, code execution, text editing, computer use, and web browsing, with MCP support. Agents from OpenAI Agents SDK, Pydantic AI, LangChain, Claude Code, Codex CLI, and Gemini CLI can be integrated. Untrusted model code can run in Docker, Kubernetes, Modal, Proxmox, Vagrant, and other systems through an extension API.