Athina AI vs Respan (2026)
Updated February 28, 2026
vs
Overview
Rating
10.0 / 10
Rating
10.0 / 10
Best For
—
Best For
Engineering and product teams running AI agents and LLM apps in production
Product Summary
Athina AI is a monitoring and evaluation platform for production LLM applications.
Product Summary
Respan is LLM observability built into an AI router: nested traces for every agent run, evals on live production traffic, and a click from any score to its trace.
Starting Price
—
Starting Price
$0
Free Trial
No
Free Trial
Yes
Free Version
No
Free Version
Yes
Website
Website
Key features
Core capabilities each platform advertises.
Data not available
- Nested traces for every LLM call, tool run, and agent turn
- Threads for multi-turn sessions
- Online evals on live production traffic
- LLM-judge, code, and human evaluators
- Datasets from production logs and experiments at scale
- Monitors with Slack, email, and webhook alerts
- Prompt versioning and deployment without code changes
Strengths and tradeoffs
What each tool does well, and the limitations to keep in mind.
Pros
- Comprehensive platform covering entire AI development lifecycle from prototyping to production
- 50+ preset evaluations from established providers like Ragas and Guardrails
- Strong enterprise features including SOC-2 Type 2 compliance and self-hosted deployment
- Y Combinator-backed with proven clients like Perplexity and Meesho
- Generous free starter plan with 10k logs/month and unlimited prompts
Cons
- Small team of 11 employees may limit support capacity for enterprise clients
- Lack of transparent pricing for Pro and Enterprise plans requiring sales contact
- Founded in 2022, relatively new compared to more established observability platforms
Pros
- Every score links to the trace that produced it
- Evals run on live production traffic, not only on test sets
- Built into the router, so there's no separate gateway to integrate
- Monitors alert the moment a metric breaches
- Unlimited seats on the free plan
Cons
- The free plan retains data for 7 days
- The free plan includes 1k scores and 2 evaluators
- Ingestion throughput is metered per tier, starting at 412 logs per minute on Free
Athina AI or Respan — which should you choose?
Choose Athina AI if you wantChoose if you want
Data not available
Choose Respan if you wantChoose if you want
- Debugging agent failures down to the step that broke
- Catching quality regressions before users report them
- Turning production failures into test datasets
- Testing a prompt or model change against real cases before shipping
- Attributing LLM cost to each end customer
Compare Athina AI and Respan on your own traffic
10KFree traces/mo
1,000+Models
5 minSetup
Respan lets you trace LLM and agent calls across any model or framework, A/B test prompts on production traffic, and route requests across 1,000+ models through one gateway.
Try Respan free