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LLM Observability🔴Developer
H

Helicone

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.

Starting atFree
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💡

In Plain English

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.

OverviewFeaturesPricingGetting StartedUse CasesIntegrationsLimitationsFAQSecurityAlternatives

Overview

Helicone is an open-source LLM observability platform aimed at production AI apps. It works as either a proxy gateway (you swap your OpenAI/Anthropic base URL for Helicone's and instantly get logs, costs, latency, caching, retries, and prompt versioning) or an async SDK that ships logs without sitting in the request path. The hosted dashboard gives you per-request traces, token-level cost attribution by user, session, and feature, and tools for prompt experiments and offline evaluations. Helicone supports 20+ providers including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Mistral, Together, Groq, OpenRouter, AWS Bedrock, and Azure OpenAI, plus a unified billing view across them.

🦞

Using with OpenClaw

▼

Monitor OpenClaw agent performance and usage through Helicone integration. Track costs, latency, and success rates.

Use Case Example:

Gain insights into your OpenClaw agent's behavior and optimize performance using Helicone's analytics and monitoring capabilities.

Learn about OpenClaw →
🎨

Vibe Coding Friendly?

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Difficulty:intermediate

Analytics platform requiring some technical understanding but good API documentation.

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Editorial Review

Helicone is the fastest win when a team needs to see LLM requests, latency, users, and cost before investing in a heavier evaluation platform.

Key Features

AI gateway+

AI gateway is a core Helicone capability confirmed from the staged data and fetched vendor copy.

Use Case:

LLM cost monitoring by model, user, endpoint or feature.

request logging+

request logging is a core Helicone capability confirmed from the staged data and fetched vendor copy.

Use Case:

Debugging bad AI responses using request logs, sessions and prompt history.

sessions/users analytics+

sessions/users analytics is a core Helicone capability confirmed from the staged data and fetched vendor copy.

Use Case:

Routing and gateway governance across multiple LLM providers.

prompts and datasets+

prompts and datasets is a core Helicone capability confirmed from the staged data and fetched vendor copy.

Use Case:

LLM cost monitoring by model, user, endpoint or feature.

alerts and reports+

alerts and reports is a core Helicone capability confirmed from the staged data and fetched vendor copy.

Use Case:

Debugging bad AI responses using request logs, sessions and prompt history.

Pricing Plans

Free

$0

    Pro

    $79/month

      Team

      $799/month

        Enterprise

        Custom

          See Full Pricing →Free vs Paid →Is it worth it? →

          Ready to get started with Helicone?

          View Pricing Options →

          Getting Started with Helicone

          1. 1Create a free Helicone account at helicone.ai and generate your Helicone API key.
          2. 2Replace your LLM provider's base URL with Helicone's proxy URL (e.g., oai.helicone.ai for OpenAI) and add your Helicone-Auth header.
          3. 3Send your first LLM request through the proxy and verify it appears in the Helicone dashboard with cost and latency metrics.
          4. 4Add custom properties via Helicone-Property headers to segment requests by user, feature, or environment.
          5. 5Enable gateway features like caching, rate limiting, or retries by adding the corresponding Helicone headers to your requests.
          Ready to start? Try Helicone →

          Best Use Cases

          🎯

          Production LLM apps that need cost and latency visibility from day one

          ⚡

          Multi-provider stacks that want one unified log and gateway

          🔧

          Agent debugging where you need per-step traces and sessions

          🚀

          Regulated teams that need a self-hostable observability stack

          Integration Ecosystem

          9 integrations

          Helicone works with these platforms and services:

          🧠 LLM Providers
          OpenAIAnthropicGoogleCohereMistral
          ☁️ Cloud Platforms
          AWSVercel
          📈 Monitoring
          Datadog
          🔗 Other
          GitHub
          View full Integration Matrix →

          Limitations & What It Can't Do

          We believe in transparent reviews. Here's what Helicone doesn't handle well:

          • ⚠Proxy architecture adds 20-50ms latency per request — compounds in latency-sensitive applications making many sequential LLM calls
          • ⚠Per-request focus provides limited visibility into complex agent orchestration patterns, tool chains, or retrieval pipelines
          • ⚠Session and trace grouping features are newer and less mature than dedicated tracing platforms like Langfuse or LangSmith
          • ⚠Self-hosted deployment requires managing proxy gateway, Supabase backend, and ClickHouse — operationally complex for small teams
          • ⚠Non-OpenAI/Anthropic providers require custom gateway configuration via Helicone-Target-URL header that may not support all features equally

          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

          Frequently Asked Questions

          Does the Helicone proxy add noticeable latency to LLM requests?+

          Typically 20-50ms per request based on Helicone's published benchmarks. For most applications this is negligible since LLM calls themselves take 500ms-30s — meaning the overhead represents less than 5% of total request time. For latency-critical applications making many sequential calls in agent loops, the overhead can compound and become noticeable. Helicone offers an async logging mode that bypasses the proxy entirely for teams where every millisecond counts — you send requests directly to the LLM provider and POST the request/response data to Helicone's logging endpoint afterward, eliminating any proxy overhead while still capturing full observability data.

          Can Helicone trace multi-step agent workflows, not just individual LLM calls?+

          Helicone has added session tracking that groups related requests together using a Helicone-Session-Id header, but it's primarily designed around individual request observability. You can attach session IDs and parent-child relationships via Helicone-Parent-Id headers to build hierarchical trace trees, but the visualization is less detailed than dedicated tracing platforms. For deep multi-step agent tracing with custom spans, complex tool call hierarchies, and retrieval pipeline visualization, dedicated tracing tools like Langfuse or LangSmith provide richer instrumentation through their SDK-based approaches. Helicone's strength is capturing every LLM call with minimal setup; for full agent workflow tracing, consider pairing Helicone's gateway-level logging with a dedicated tracing SDK.

          How does Helicone compare to Langfuse?+

          Helicone focuses on operational observability (cost tracking, caching, rate limiting) with dead-simple proxy integration that takes under 5 minutes. Langfuse provides deeper tracing, evaluation, and prompt management with SDK-based integration that takes longer to set up but captures richer agent context. Helicone is the better choice when cost visibility and operational controls are the priority; Langfuse wins when you need detailed workflow tracing and evaluation pipelines for complex agent applications. The integration models differ fundamentally — Helicone's proxy approach requires no code changes beyond a URL swap, while Langfuse's decorator and callback-based SDK captures arbitrary application steps beyond just LLM calls. Many teams use both together: Helicone at the gateway for cost controls and caching, and Langfuse via SDK for deep tracing and prompt management.

          Is there a self-hosted option for Helicone?+

          Yes, Helicone is fully open-source under MIT license and can be self-hosted via Docker. The self-hosted version requires running the proxy gateway, a Supabase backend for storage and authentication, and ClickHouse for analytics, plus optional Redis for caching. It's more operationally complex than the cloud version but gives you full data control — important for healthcare, finance, and EU-based teams with data residency requirements. Helicone publishes a docker-compose setup in their GitHub repository (github.com/Helicone/helicone) with deployment documentation. The self-hosted version includes all core features: request logging, cost analytics, caching, rate limiting, and the full dashboard experience. Enterprise customers can also get dedicated support for on-premise deployments.

          Which LLM providers does Helicone support?+

          Helicone supports 20+ providers including OpenAI, Anthropic, Azure OpenAI, Google (Vertex AI and Gemini), AWS Bedrock, Cohere, Mistral, Groq, Together AI, Fireworks AI, OpenRouter, Perplexity, DeepInfra, Replicate, and custom model endpoints. OpenAI and Anthropic have the most seamless one-line integration via dedicated proxy URLs (oai.helicone.ai and anthropic.helicone.ai). Other providers use the universal Helicone-Target-URL header pattern, which works with any HTTP-based LLM API. Cost calculations are pre-configured for major providers and models, with automatic token counting and per-model pricing. Since the proxy simply forwards HTTP requests, adding support for new providers is straightforward — any endpoint accessible via HTTP can be routed through Helicone's gateway.

          🔒 Security & Compliance

          🛡️ SOC2 Compliant
          ✅
          SOC2
          Yes
          ✅
          GDPR
          Yes
          ❌
          HIPAA
          No
          ✅
          SSO
          Yes
          ✅
          Self-Hosted
          Yes
          ✅
          On-Prem
          Yes
          ✅
          RBAC
          Yes
          ✅
          Audit Log
          Yes
          ✅
          API Key Auth
          Yes
          ✅
          Open Source
          Yes
          ✅
          Encryption at Rest
          Yes
          ✅
          Encryption in Transit
          Yes
          Data Retention: configurable
          Data Residency: US, EU
          📋 Privacy Policy →🛡️ Security Page →
          🦞

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          What's New in 2026

          Helicone has expanded session tracking and trace grouping in 2025, added experiment tracking with A/B testing for prompt variations with statistical significance analysis, broadened provider support to include AWS Bedrock, Groq, Together AI, and Fireworks AI, and introduced an AI Gateway product that unifies routing across providers with automatic fallback and key management. The platform also added prompt management with versioning and a template registry where teams can manage production prompts with full version history, an evaluation framework for systematic quality testing using LLM-as-judge scoring and custom evaluation functions, and the ability to create datasets from production logs for fine-tuning or evaluation workflows. Additional improvements include configurable alerting on cost thresholds, error rates, and latency spikes via webhooks, and deeper integrations with LLM frameworks including LangChain, LlamaIndex, CrewAI, and the Vercel AI SDK.

          Alternatives to Helicone

          Langfuse

          LLM Observability

          Langfuse is an open-source LLM observability and engineering platform providing tracing, prompt management, evaluations, and dataset management for production AI applications.

          LangSmith

          AI Observability

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

          Braintrust

          LLM Observability

          AI observability platform for evals, production tracing, prompt management, and regression detection.

          Arize Phoenix

          AI Observability

          Phoenix is Arize's open-source LLM observability project, and it has quietly become the default way tens of thousands of teams see what their agents are actually doing in production. The pitch is simple: `pip install arize-phoenix`, instrument with OpenInference (or any OpenTelemetry-compatible library), and every LLM call, tool invocation, retrieval, and embedding shows up as a spanned timeline you can filter, search, and replay. No vendor account required, no proprietary SDK lock-in. The Open

          View All Alternatives & Detailed Comparison →

          User Reviews

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          Quick Info

          Category

          LLM Observability

          Website

          www.helicone.ai/
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