Helicone vs Humanloop (2026)
Updated March 10, 2026
Overview
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.
Humanloop is a prompt engineering and evaluation platform that helps teams manage, version, and optimize LLM prompts. It provides prompt playgrounds, A/B testing, human feedback collection, and evaluation pipelines. Teams can track prompt performance across models and deploy optimized prompts to production.
Strengths and tradeoffs
What each tool does well, and the limitations to keep in mind.
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
Pros
- Collaborative platform for team development
- Version control for prompts
- A/B testing and evaluation tools
- Free tier for individuals
Cons
- Pro tier at USD 99/mo may be steep for small teams
- Learning curve for full feature utilization
- Requires commitment to platform workflow
Compare Helicone and Humanloop 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 1,000+ models through one gateway.
Try Respan free