Helicone vs Traceloop: Observability, Prompts & Evals Comparison
Compare Helicone and Traceloop side by side. Both are tools in the Observability, Prompts & Evals category.
The short answer
Choose Helicone if open-source with 5.2K GitHub stars and strong community support.
Choose Traceloop if acquired by ServiceNow for $60-80M providing strong financial backing and integration opportunities.
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Quick Comparison
| Category | Observability, Prompts & Evals | Observability, Prompts & Evals |
| Pricing | — | open-source |
| Best For | — | Teams already using Datadog/Splunk wanting LLM observability |
| Website | helicone.ai | traceloop.com |
| Key Features | — |
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Pros & Cons: Helicone vs Traceloop
- +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
- −Adds computational cost and one network hop for cloud deployment
- −Limited pricing transparency on website
- −May require infrastructure expertise for self-hosted setup
- +Acquired by ServiceNow for $60-80M providing strong financial backing and integration opportunities
- +Built on OpenTelemetry standards with open-source OpenLLMetry SDK
- +Recognized as Gartner Cool Vendor demonstrating industry validation
- +One-line code integration for quick setup and deployment
- +Enterprise-ready with SOC 2, HIPAA compliance and multiple deployment options
- −ServiceNow acquisition may lead to platform changes, pricing adjustments, or strategic shifts
- −Small team of 9 employees may be absorbed into larger ServiceNow organization affecting support
- −Limited transparent pricing information following acquisition
- −Uncertainty around long-term product roadmap under new ownership
About Helicone
Helicone is an open-source AI Gateway and LLM Observability platform that enables developers to route, debug, and analyze their AI applications with end-to-end visibility from user sessions to individual token decisions. As a Y Combinator-backed company, Helicone combines observability with infrastructure management, offering token-level cost analysis, prompt version tracking, and session tracing alongside intelligent routing features like caching, rate limiting, and load balancing. The platform provides real-time dashboards, user metrics tracking, alert systems, and multi-step LLM interaction visualization for root cause analysis. Helicone is SOC 2 Type II certified, HIPAA compliant, and offers flexible deployment options including cloud-hosted gateway leveraging Cloudflare's global network, self-hosted via Kubernetes Helm charts, or SDK-only observability without proxying.
About Traceloop
Traceloop is an observability and quality assurance platform designed to help teams ship LLM applications 10x faster by transforming evaluation data into continuous feedback loops. The platform enables developers to monitor, test, and improve large language model applications throughout their lifecycle. Built on OpenTelemetry and shipping with OpenLLMetry (their open-source SDK), Traceloop provides real-time monitoring with just one line of code, giving live visibility into prompts, responses, latency, and more. The platform offers built-in quality evaluations for faithfulness, relevance, and safety that automatically apply to production data, along with custom evaluators that users can define and train on annotated examples. Traceloop features automated quality gates that run evaluations automatically on pull requests and in real-time during app execution, plus LLM drift detection to catch performance degradation before it reaches users. The platform supports 20+ LLM providers including OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Bedrock, and Ollama, and integrates with popular frameworks like LangChain, LlamaIndex, and CrewAI. In March 2026, Traceloop was acquired by ServiceNow for $60-80 million, marking the third Israeli acquisition by ServiceNow in under three months. The platform is SOC 2 and HIPAA compliant with cloud, on-premises, and air-gapped deployment options. Traceloop has been recognized as a Gartner Cool Vendor and serves notable clients including HiBob, Target, Miro, IBM, and Babbel.
What is Observability, Prompts & Evals?
Tools for monitoring LLM applications in production, managing and versioning prompts, and evaluating model outputs. Includes tracing, logging, cost tracking, prompt engineering platforms, automated evaluation frameworks, and human annotation workflows.
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