Braintrust vs Helicone (2026)
Overview
Braintrust is an LLM evaluation and observability platform. Compare its evals, tracing, pricing, pros and cons, and alternatives.
Helicone is an open-source LLM observability and proxy platform. By adding a single line of code, developers get request logging, cost tracking, caching, rate limiting, and analytics for their LLM applications. Helicone supports all major LLM providers and offers both proxy and async logging modes. Popular with startups for its generous free tier and simple integration.
Key features
Core capabilities each platform advertises.
- Experiments comparing prompts and models
- Code-based and LLM-as-judge scorers
- Datasets built from production traces
- Production logging and tracing
Strengths and tradeoffs
What each tool does well, and the limitations to keep in mind.
Pros
- Unlimited users on every plan, including free
- Production traces, datasets, and experiments connect in one eval workflow
- Framework-agnostic SDKs across multiple languages
- Loop agent drafts scorers and datasets from your own data
Cons
- Processed data and scores bill separately, and both grow with eval volume
- 14-day retention on Starter and 30 days on Pro
- Gateway is in public preview with no SLA
- Self-hosting and custom data export are Enterprise only
Pros
- Open-source with 5.2K GitHub stars and strong community support
- Minimal latency overhead (under 1ms for self-hosted)
- Flexible deployment options including cloud-hosted, self-hosted, or SDK-only
- Y Combinator-backed with SOC 2 Type II and HIPAA compliance
- No code changes required for AI Gateway features like caching and rate limiting
Cons
- Adds computational cost and one network hop for cloud deployment
- Limited pricing transparency on website
- May require infrastructure expertise for self-hosted setup
Braintrust or Helicone — which should you choose?
Choose Braintrust if you wantChoose if you want
- Iterating on prompts with production data
- Running evaluations across model versions
- Building golden datasets from production traffic
- Human review of LLM outputs
Choose Helicone if you wantChoose if you want
Compare Braintrust and Helicone on your own traffic
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