LangSmith vs Opik (2026)
Updated March 10, 2026
Overview
LangSmith is LangChain's platform for tracing, evaluating, and deploying AI agents. Compare its features, pricing, pros and cons, and alternatives.
Opik by Comet is an open-source LLM evaluation and observability platform. It provides tracing, evaluation scoring, dataset management, and experiment tracking for LLM applications. Opik supports automated LLM-as-judge evaluations and integrates with popular frameworks like LangChain and LlamaIndex.
Key features
Core capabilities each platform advertises.
- 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.
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
Pros
- Production-ready
- Good performance
- Active development
Cons
- Pricing varies
- Setup required
LangSmith or Opik — which should you choose?
Choose LangSmith if you wantChoose if you want
- Debugging LangChain and LangGraph agents
- Evaluating agent output against datasets
- Human review through annotation queues
- Deploying long-running agents
Choose Opik if you wantChoose if you want
Compare LangSmith and Opik 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