Braintrust vs Helicone
Detailed side-by-side comparison to help you choose the right tool
Braintrust
🔴DeveloperLLM Observability
Braintrust is an evals-first LLM observability platform combining production tracing, prompt playgrounds, autoevals, and Topics-based pattern discovery for teams shipping AI in production.
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FreeHelicone
🔴DeveloperLLM Observability
Open-source LLM observability and AI gateway — logs every prompt, response, cost, and latency across 20+ providers with a one-line proxy or async SDK, plus caching, retries, and prompt experiments.
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💡 Our Take
Choose Braintrust if you're building production LLM apps that need systematic evaluation, automated prompt optimization, and multi-provider support beyond OpenAI. Choose Helicone (~$20/month) if you only need simple OpenAI usage tracking, cost monitoring, and basic logging without evaluation infrastructure. Helicone is the simpler drop-in for solo developers; Braintrust is the full quality platform for engineering teams of 3+.
Braintrust - Pros & Cons
Pros
- ✓Evals-first design with versioned datasets, side-by-side prompt comparisons, and autoevals library means iteration is the default workflow, not an afterthought
- ✓Brainstore (purpose-built for AI traces) and the official MCP server make large-scale log search and IDE-driven prompt iteration meaningfully faster than competitors
- ✓Generous Starter tier ($0/mo with 1 GB processed data, 10k scores, unlimited users/projects/datasets) lets teams ship real evals before paying anything
Cons
- ✗$249/month Pro tier is a steep first paid step versus self-hosting Langfuse, which is free if you run the open-source version on your own infrastructure
- ✗Topics token costs ($0.06/mtok input, $0.40/mtok output beyond credits) can spike quickly on chatty production traffic with custom facets
- ✗No built-in LLM gateway, prompt router, or model fallback layer — you still need OpenRouter or similar for routing and resilience
Helicone - Pros & Cons
Pros
- ✓5-minute proxy integration captures full traces, cost, and latency across 20+ providers
- ✓Real AI gateway features (caching, retries, fallback, key vault) replace a custom proxy
- ✓MIT-licensed and self-hostable on Postgres + ClickHouse — passes regulated procurement
Cons
- ✗Proxy mode adds a network hop unless self-hosted in your own region
- ✗Prompt experiment UX is less mature than dedicated eval platforms like Braintrust
- ✗Self-hosting requires running ClickHouse, which is an extra ops surface
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