Apigee AI Gateway vs Helicone: LLM Gateways Comparison
Compare Apigee AI Gateway and Helicone side by side. Both are tools in the LLM Gateways category.
Updated March 10, 2026
The short answer
Choose Apigee AI Gateway if production-ready.
Choose Helicone if extremely simple integration (one line of code).
Want to compare Apigee AI Gateway and Helicone on your own traffic?
Respan lets you trace LLM and agent calls across any model or framework, A/B test prompts on production traffic, and route requests across 250+ models through one gateway. Free tier covers 10K traces per month. Setup in 5 minutes, no credit card.
Quick Comparison
| Category | LLM Gateways | LLM Gateways |
| Pricing | Enterprise | Freemium |
| Best For | Google Cloud enterprises who need to manage AI API traffic | Developer teams who need visibility into their LLM usage, costs, and performance |
| Website | cloud.google.com | helicone.ai |
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Pros & Cons: Apigee AI Gateway vs Helicone
- +Production-ready
- +Good performance
- +Active development
- −Pricing varies
- −Setup required
- +Extremely simple integration (one line of code)
- +Open-source with self-hosting option
- +Generous free tier (100k requests)
- +Supports all major LLM providers
- −Advanced features require paid tiers
- −Data retention limited on free tier
- −Self-hosting requires technical expertise
Pricing: Apigee AI Gateway vs Helicone
- · Core features
- · Community support
- · Advanced features
- · Priority support
- · Custom solutions
- · SLA guarantees
- · 100k requests/month
- · Basic observability
- · 1-month retention
- · Community support
- · 1M requests/month
- · 6-month retention
- · Advanced features
- · Email support
- · Unlimited requests
- · Custom retention
- · SOC 2 compliance
- · Dedicated support
When to Choose Apigee AI Gateway vs Helicone
- Managing AI APIs on Google Cloud
- Enterprise API security for AI endpoints
- Usage metering and billing for AI services
- LLM cost monitoring and optimization
- Production request debugging
- User-level usage tracking and rate limiting
About Apigee AI Gateway
AI platform providing comprehensive solutions for enterprise applications. The platform provides essential capabilities for modern AI applications with focus on scalability and reliability.
About Helicone
Helicone is an open-source LLM observability platform providing monitoring, logging, and analytics for AI applications. The platform offers detailed insights into LLM requests, costs, latency, and user behavior with minimal integration overhead—just one line of code to get started. Helicone supports all major LLM providers and provides features like caching, rate limiting, prompt management, and user tracking. The platform is available as both open-source for self-hosting and as a managed cloud service with generous free tiers. Helicone helps teams understand and optimize their AI applications through comprehensive observability.
What is LLM Gateways?
Unified API platforms and proxies that aggregate multiple LLM providers behind a single endpoint, providing model routing, fallback, caching, rate limiting, cost optimization, and access control.
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