Updated March 9, 2026
LangSmith is LangChain's observability and evaluation platform for LLM applications. It provides detailed tracing of every LLM call, chain execution, and agent step—showing inputs, outputs, latency, token usage, and cost. LangSmith includes annotation queues for human feedback, dataset management for evaluation, and regression testing for prompt changes. It's the most comprehensive debugging tool for LangChain-based applications.
Phoenix is an open-source LLM observability and evaluation platform from Arize AI. It supports OpenTelemetry-based tracing across LLM and agent applications, with built-in evaluators, dataset management, and prompt playgrounds. Phoenix can be self-hosted with Docker or run via the Arize-hosted cloud version.
Core capabilities each platform advertises.
What each tool does well, and the limitations to keep in mind.
Pros
Cons
Pros
Cons
Choose LangSmith if you wantChoose if you want
Choose Phoenix 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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