Arize Phoenix vs LangSmith

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

Arize Phoenix

🟡Low Code

AI observability

Arize Phoenix provides open-source tracing, evaluations, and MCP tooling for ai observability workflows. It includes MCP compatibility.

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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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FeatureArize PhoenixLangSmith
CategoryAI observabilityAI Observability
Pricing Plans84 tiers59 tiers
Starting PriceFreeFree
Key Features
  • • LLM Tracing & Observability
  • • Evaluation Framework
  • • Experiment Management
  • • 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

Arize Phoenix - Pros & Cons

Pros

  • ✓Open-source and self-hostable
  • ✓Trace timelines expose intermediate failures
  • ✓AX Free includes 25,000 monthly spans
  • ✓Datasets support regression testing

Cons

  • ✗Instrumentation and evaluator design require engineering
  • ✗Pro includes only 50,000 spans and 30-day retention
  • ✗Self-hosting shifts operations to the user
  • ✗Unredacted traces can capture sensitive data

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 FeatureArize PhoenixLangSmith
SOC2✅ Yes✅ Yes
GDPR✅ Yes✅ Yes
HIPAA❌ No—
SSO❌ No✅ Yes
Self-Hosted✅ Yes🔀 Hybrid
On-Prem✅ Yes✅ Yes
RBAC❌ No✅ Yes
Audit Log❌ No✅ Yes
Open Source✅ Yes❌ No
API Key Auth✅ Yes✅ Yes
Encryption at Rest✅ Yes✅ Yes
Encryption in Transit✅ Yes✅ Yes
Data ResidencyAvailableUS, EU
Data Retentionconfigurableconfigurable
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Review Arize PhoenixReview LangSmith