Galileo vs Helicone

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

Galileo

🔴Developer

AI Evaluation

Galileo review 2026: enterprise AI evals, observability, guardrails, and Luna evaluator models for RAG and agents — features, pricing, pros, cons.

Was this helpful?

Starting Price

Custom

Helicone

🔴Developer

LLM 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.

Was this helpful?

Starting Price

Free

Feature Comparison

Scroll horizontally to compare details.

FeatureGalileoHelicone
CategoryAI EvaluationLLM Observability
Pricing Plans285 tiers4 tiers
Starting PriceFree
Key Features
  • Automated hallucination detection using proprietary ChainPoll methodology
  • Real-time production monitoring for LLM applications with custom alerting
  • RAG pipeline evaluation covering both retrieval and generation quality
  • Proxy-Based Request Logging
  • Cost Analytics & Budget Alerts
  • Gateway-Level Caching

Galileo - Pros & Cons

Pros

  • Luna evaluators are dramatically cheaper than LLM-as-judge — eval coverage can stay on in production
  • End-to-end coverage: evals + traces + guardrails + agent root-cause from one vendor
  • Strong enterprise compliance posture (VPC, audit, SSO) suitable for regulated industries

Cons

  • No public pricing — every conversation starts with sales, which slows POC adoption
  • Heavier and more opinionated than open-source [/tools/langfuse](/tools/langfuse) or [/tools/arize-phoenix](/tools/arize-phoenix) — early-stage teams may find it overkill
  • Luna evaluators are proprietary — verify quality on your domain before assuming they replace LLM-judge in your stack

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

Not sure which to pick?

🎯 Take our quiz →

🔒 Security & Compliance Comparison

Scroll horizontally to compare details.

Security FeatureGalileoHelicone
SOC2✅ Yes
GDPR✅ Yes
HIPAA❌ No
SSO✅ Yes
Self-Hosted✅ Yes
On-Prem✅ Yes
RBAC✅ Yes
Audit Log✅ Yes
Open Source✅ Yes
API Key Auth✅ Yes
Encryption at Rest✅ Yes
Encryption in Transit✅ Yes
Data ResidencyUS, EU
Data Retentionconfigurable
🦞

New to AI tools?

Read practical guides for choosing and using AI tools

🔔

Price Drop Alerts

Get notified when AI tools lower their prices

Tracking 2 tools

We only email when prices actually change. No spam, ever.

Get weekly AI agent tool insights

Comparisons, new tool launches, and expert recommendations delivered to your inbox.

No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.

Ready to Choose?

Read the full reviews to make an informed decision