Updated March 10, 2026
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 can function as both a gateway proxy and a logging-only integration.
OrcaRouter is an OpenAI-compatible LLM router that picks a model per request across 200+ models, with zero token markup on pay-as-you-go.
Core capabilities each platform advertises.
What each tool does well, and the limitations to keep in mind.
Pros
Cons
Pros
Cons
Choose Helicone if you wantChoose if you want
Choose OrcaRouter if you wantChoose if you want
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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