Helicone vs Kong AI Gateway: LLM Gateways Comparison
Compare Helicone and Kong AI Gateway side by side. Both are tools in the LLM Gateways category.
Updated March 10, 2026
The short answer
Choose Helicone if extremely simple integration (one line of code).
Choose Kong AI Gateway if developer-friendly platform.
Want to compare Helicone and Kong AI Gateway 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 250+ models through one gateway. Free tier covers 10K traces per month. Setup in 5 minutes, no credit card.
Quick Comparison
| Category | LLM Gateways | LLM Gateways |
| Pricing | Freemium | Enterprise |
| Best For | Developer teams who need visibility into their LLM usage, costs, and performance | Enterprises using Kong who want to extend their API gateway with AI capabilities |
| Website | helicone.ai | konghq.com |
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Pros & Cons: Helicone vs Kong AI Gateway
- +Extremely simple integration (one line of code)
- +Open-source with self-hosting option
- +Generous free tier (100k requests)
- +Supports all major LLM providers
- −Advanced features require paid tiers
- −Data retention limited on free tier
- −Self-hosting requires technical expertise
- +Developer-friendly platform
- +Production-ready
- +Good performance
- +Active development
- −Enterprise pricing varies
- −Setup complexity
- −Learning curve
Pricing: Helicone vs Kong AI Gateway
- · 100k requests/month
- · Basic observability
- · 1-month retention
- · Community support
- · 1M requests/month
- · 6-month retention
- · Advanced features
- · Email support
- · Unlimited requests
- · Custom retention
- · SOC 2 compliance
- · Dedicated support
- · Core features
- · Community support
- · Basic limits
- · Advanced features
- · Higher limits
- · Priority support
- · Custom solutions
- · Dedicated support
- · SLA guarantees
When to Choose Helicone vs Kong AI Gateway
- LLM cost monitoring and optimization
- Production request debugging
- User-level usage tracking and rate limiting
- Enterprise AI API management
- Load balancing across LLM providers
- AI traffic governance and security
About Helicone
Helicone is an open-source LLM observability platform providing monitoring, logging, and analytics for AI applications. The platform offers detailed insights into LLM requests, costs, latency, and user behavior with minimal integration overhead—just one line of code to get started. Helicone supports all major LLM providers and provides features like caching, rate limiting, prompt management, and user tracking. The platform is available as both open-source for self-hosting and as a managed cloud service with generous free tiers. Helicone helps teams understand and optimize their AI applications through comprehensive observability.
About Kong AI Gateway
Kong AI Gateway extends Kong API Gateway with AI-specific routing and observability. The platform provides comprehensive features for production AI applications with focus on reliability and developer experience.
What is LLM Gateways?
Unified API platforms and proxies that aggregate multiple LLM providers behind a single endpoint, providing model routing, fallback, caching, rate limiting, cost optimization, and access control.
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