Helicone
Gateway and observability in one — one integration instead of two.
88
sovereigntyHelicone is an Apache-2.0 AI gateway with logging, cost tracking and caching built into the routing layer, which makes it a genuine two-birds option: point your client at Helicone and you get both the gateway and the observability without instrumenting your application code at all. That proxy-based approach is the practical distinction — nothing to add to your codebase, at the cost of only seeing what passes through the proxy.
OPEN SOURCEApache-2.0SELF-HOSTLOCAL-FIRST
LicenseApache-2.0
PricingFree and self-hostable under Apache-2.0. Hosted service has a free tier of roughly 10,000 requests per month, with paid plans starting around $79/month.
Open sourceYes
Self-hostableYes
Local-first dataYes
What it does well
- +Apache-2.0, fully self-hostable
- +Proxy-based — no code instrumentation needed to start
- +Gateway and observability in one component
- +Real free tier on the hosted version for evaluating it
Where it falls short
- −Only sees traffic through the proxy — no visibility into internal agent steps
- −Weaker evaluation tooling than Langfuse or LangSmith
- −Smaller project (about 6k stars)
- −Adds a proxy hop to every model call
Helicone as an alternative to
Where Helicone shows up in our comparisons, and how it ranked.
Helicone head-to-head
Straight comparisons against the tools people weigh it against.