Helicone: LLM Gateways

Founded 2023|San Francisco, California|11-50 people|Freemium

What is 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.

Key features

Core capabilities this platform advertises.

LLM observability and monitoring
Cost tracking and analytics
Request caching
Rate limiting and user management
Open-source with managed option

Strengths and tradeoffs

What this tool does well, and the limitations to keep in mind.

Pros

Extremely simple integration (one line of code)
Open-source with self-hosting option
Generous free tier (100k requests)
Supports all major LLM providers

Cons

Advanced features require paid tiers
Data retention limited on free tier
Self-hosting requires technical expertise

Plans & pricing

What's included in each plan, and how the tiers compare.

Free

Per month

100k requests/month
Basic observability
1-month retention
Community support

Pro

$20

Per month

1M requests/month
6-month retention
Advanced features
Email support

Enterprise

Custom

Annual contract

Unlimited requests
Custom retention
SOC 2 compliance
Dedicated support
Self-hosted option

View official pricing page

Common use cases

Developer teams who need visibility into their LLM usage, costs, and performance

LLM cost monitoring and optimization
Production request debugging
User-level usage tracking and rate limiting
Caching to reduce latency and cost
Team-wide LLM spend management

Using Helicone with Respan

Integrate Helicone's observability platform with Respan to monitor and optimize AI applications. Add comprehensive logging and analytics with minimal code. Combine Helicone's insights with Respan's orchestration for data-driven AI operations.

One-line integration for instant observability
Monitor costs, latency, and usage across all LLMs
Open-source option for self-hosting
Generous free tier with 100k requests/month

Run Helicone in production with Respan

10KFree traces/mo

1,000+Models

5 minSetup

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

Best Helicone alternatives & competitors

Top companies in LLM Gateways you can use instead of Helicone.

Respan

One API for 1,000+ models