Cloudflare AI Gateway vs LangSmith

Detailed side-by-side comparison to help you choose the right tool

Cloudflare AI Gateway

App Deployment

Cloudflare AI Gateway is a free AI observability and control layer that proxies requests to OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and 25+ providers with caching, rate limiting, logging, DLP, and Guardrails.

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Starting Price

Free
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LangSmith

🔴Developer

AI Observability

LangSmith is LangChain's commercial observability, evaluation and prompt management platform for LLM apps and agents in production.

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Starting Price

Free
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Feature Comparison

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FeatureCloudflare AI GatewayLangSmith
CategoryApp DeploymentAI Observability
Pricing Plans6 tiers59 tiers
Starting PriceFreeFree
Key Features
  • • LLM Request Routing
  • • Response Caching
  • • Rate Limiting
  • • Tracing for any LLM stack via Python/TypeScript SDKs or OpenTelemetry
  • • LLM-as-judge, code-based and pairwise evaluations
  • • Versioned prompts with production A/B traffic splits

💡 Our Take

Choose Cloudflare AI Gateway for production traffic control: caching, rate limiting, failover, and edge-network performance across 20+ providers. Choose LangSmith if your priority is prompt engineering, evaluations, dataset-driven testing, and deep LangChain/LangGraph trace debugging — LangSmith is a developer-loop tool, AI Gateway is an ops/infrastructure tool, and many teams run both.

Cloudflare AI Gateway - Pros & Cons

Pros

  • ✓Core features are genuinely free on every Cloudflare account — analytics, caching, rate limiting, DLP, persistent logs
  • ✓One line of code change works with existing OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google SDKs across 25+ providers
  • ✓Runs on Cloudflare's edge so proxy latency overhead is single-digit milliseconds globally

Cons

  • ✗Log retention is capped per plan (100k Free / 10M per gateway Paid) — not unlimited
  • ✗Span-level observability and evals are thinner than Langfuse or Helicone
  • ✗Dynamic Routing, Spend Limits, and BYOK are still beta with documented rough edges

LangSmith - Pros & Cons

Pros

  • ✓Best-in-class integration if you already use LangChain or LangGraph.
  • ✓Eval suites are practical enough to actually gate releases on, not just dashboards.
  • ✓Self-hosted Enterprise tier covers SOC 2 and regulated environments.

Cons

  • ✗Per-trace pricing on Plus surprises teams that scale production traffic quickly.
  • ✗Non-LangChain stacks work but trade ergonomic polish for SDK overhead.
  • ✗Some eval features require additional LLM spend on top of the platform fee.

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🔒 Security & Compliance Comparison

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Security FeatureCloudflare AI GatewayLangSmith
SOC2✅ Yes✅ Yes
GDPR✅ Yes✅ Yes
HIPAA❌ No—
SSO✅ Yes✅ Yes
Self-Hosted—🔀 Hybrid
On-Prem❌ No✅ Yes
RBAC✅ Yes✅ Yes
Audit Log✅ Yes✅ Yes
Open Source❌ No❌ No
API Key Auth✅ Yes✅ Yes
Encryption at Rest✅ Yes✅ Yes
Encryption in Transit✅ Yes✅ Yes
Data ResidencyGLOBALUS, EU
Data Retentionconfigurableconfigurable
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Read the full reviews to make an informed decision

Review Cloudflare AI GatewayReview LangSmith