Alternatives to Helicone
An open-source AI gateway and observability platform for routing, logging and debugging LLM requests. The listings below can replace it for an important use case. Each note says what changes if you switch.
The original
Helicone
An open-source AI gateway and observability platform for routing, logging and debugging LLM requests.
Replacements
Listings that take over the same core job as Helicone.
LiteLLM
A self-hosted AI gateway that calls over 100 LLM providers through one OpenAI-compatible API.
LiteLLM is a self-hosted gateway calling over 100 providers through one OpenAI-style API with cost tracking, load balancing and guardrails, but you maintain it yourself.
Langfuse
An open-source platform for tracing, evaluating and managing prompts for LLM applications and AI agents.
Langfuse focuses on tracing, prompt management and evals rather than request routing, and can be self-hosted or used as a hosted service.
LangSmith
A hosted platform for tracing, monitoring and evaluating LLM applications and AI agents.
LangSmith is a proprietary hosted service with step-by-step agent tracing, online evals and cost tracking, and self-hosting it requires Kubernetes.
Opik
An open-source platform from Comet for debugging, evaluating and monitoring LLM applications and agents.
Opik from Comet is open source and self-hostable with tracing, automated evaluations and dashboards, but does not act as a routing gateway.
Arize Phoenix
A self-hostable tool for tracing, evaluating and experimenting with LLM applications and agents.
Arize Phoenix offers tracing, evals and experiments that run locally or in Docker, under a source-available license rather than Helicone's Apache-2.0.
OpenRouter
A unified API and chat interface that routes requests to hundreds of AI models across many providers.
OpenRouter replaces the routing side with a paid hosted API to over 500 models and per-provider data controls, but offers less request logging and analysis.
Similar software
Related functionality, not a direct replacement.
MLflow
An open-source platform for tracing, evaluating and managing LLM applications, agents and machine learning models.
Bito
A service that routes coding-agent requests to suitable models and adds codebase context to cut costs.
DeepEval
An open-source Python framework for unit-testing and evaluating the outputs of large language model applications.
Weights & Biases
A hosted platform for tracking machine learning experiments, evaluating models and tracing LLM applications.
