Promptfoo vs LangSmith

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

Promptfoo

🔴Developer

LLM Evaluation & Testing

Open-source LLM evaluation and red-teaming framework for testing prompts, models, and agents locally or in CI.

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Starting Price

Free

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

Feature Comparison

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FeaturePromptfooLangSmith
CategoryLLM Evaluation & TestingAI Observability
Pricing Plans8 tiers59 tiers
Starting PriceFreeFree
Key Features
  • • Prompt and model evaluation
  • • RAG pipeline testing
  • • Automated red-teaming
  • • 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 Promptfoo when you need security-oriented tests for prompts, RAG pipelines, agents, jailbreaks, and adversarial behavior before release. Choose LangSmith if your main workflow is tracing, debugging, and observing LangChain or LangGraph applications in development and production.

Promptfoo - Pros & Cons

Pros

  • ✓Apache 2.0 local runner with CI-friendly configuration
  • ✓Broad provider and assertion coverage
  • ✓Evaluation and OWASP-oriented red teaming in one workflow

Cons

  • ✗Good test datasets still require substantial human judgment
  • ✗LLM-as-judge assertions add cost and evaluator bias
  • ✗Hosted Team and Enterprise pricing is not publicly verified here

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 FeaturePromptfooLangSmith
SOC2—✅ Yes
GDPR—✅ Yes
HIPAA——
SSO—✅ Yes
Self-Hosted—🔀 Hybrid
On-Prem—✅ Yes
RBAC—✅ Yes
Audit Log—✅ Yes
Open Source—❌ No
API Key Auth—✅ Yes
Encryption at Rest—✅ Yes
Encryption in Transit—✅ Yes
Data Residency—US, EU
Data Retention—configurable
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