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Confident AI vs LangSmith (2026)

Updated March 9, 2026

vs

Overview

Rating
10.0 / 10
Rating
10.0 / 10
Best For
Developers who run LLM evals in CI with DeepEval and want a hosted platform for tracing, datasets, and online evals
Best For
Teams building agents on LangChain or LangGraph who want tracing, evals, and deployment from one vendor
Product Summary

Confident AI is the LLM evaluation and observability platform from the creators of DeepEval. Compare its pricing, features, pros and cons, and alternatives.

Product Summary

LangSmith is LangChain's platform for tracing, evaluating, and deploying AI agents. Compare its features, pricing, pros and cons, and alternatives.

Starting Price
$0
Starting Price
Free
Free Trial
No
Free Trial
Yes
Free Version
Yes
Free Version
Yes

Key features

Core capabilities each platform advertises.

Confident AIConfident AI
  • DeepEval open-source evaluation framework
  • LLM-as-a-judge metrics
  • CI/CD regression testing
  • LLM tracing and online evals
LangSmithLangSmith
  • Native tracing for LangChain and LangGraph
  • OpenTelemetry and multi-language SDKs
  • Offline and online evaluations
  • Annotation queues and datasets
  • Prompt Hub with versioning

Strengths and tradeoffs

What each tool does well, and the limitations to keep in mind.

Confident AIConfident AI

Pros

  • Open-source DeepEval runs locally without the platform
  • Per-organization pricing with unlimited seats from Starter up
  • Tracing, evals, and annotation in one workspace
  • Red teaming and governance in the same platform on Enterprise

Cons

  • No built-in gateway, so routing needs a separate tool
  • Free plan limited to two seats, one project, and five test runs a week
  • Online evals and annotation queues start at $200/month
  • On-prem deployment and HIPAA are Enterprise only
LangSmithLangSmith

Pros

  • Native LangChain and LangGraph tracing with no extra instrumentation
  • Evals, datasets, and annotation queues sit in the same workspace as traces
  • Tracing, deployment, and sandboxes from one vendor
  • Framework-agnostic SDKs and OpenTelemetry support

Cons

  • Per-seat pricing on Plus, and the free plan allows one seat
  • 14-day base retention, with longer retention billed at a higher rate
  • LLM Gateway is still in beta
  • Self-hosting and hybrid deployment are Enterprise only

Confident AI or LangSmith — which should you choose?

Choose Confident AI if you want

  • Unit testing LLM applications
  • Automated evaluation in CI/CD pipelines
  • RAG evaluation with custom metrics
  • Regression testing for prompts

Choose LangSmith if you want

  • Debugging LangChain and LangGraph agents
  • Evaluating agent output against datasets
  • Human review through annotation queues
  • Deploying long-running agents

Compare Confident AI and LangSmith 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.

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