Traceloop vs LangSmith

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

Traceloop

🔴Developer

AI Observability

An observability platform and open-source instrumentation toolkit for tracing language-model applications and agents using OpenTelemetry-compatible conventions.

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Starting Price

Custom

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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FeatureTraceloopLangSmith
CategoryAI ObservabilityAI Observability
Pricing Plans6 tiers59 tiers
Starting PriceFree
Key Features
    • • 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

    Traceloop - Pros & Cons

    Pros

    • ✓OpenTelemetry alignment reduces proprietary instrumentation lock-in
    • ✓Agent-level spans expose failures hidden by aggregate model metrics
    • ✓Evaluations connect operational traces to output quality

    Cons

    • ✗Current hosted retention, event limits, and pricing could not be verified
    • ✗Captured prompts may contain personal data, secrets, or regulated content
    • ✗Instrumentation adds overhead and still requires a deliberate span and sampling design

    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 FeatureTraceloopLangSmith
    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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