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Helicone vs Portkey

HeliconePortkey

Bottom line: Helicone for teams wanting simple, cheap LLM logging; Portkey for teams routing production traffic across many LLMs.

HeliconeHelicone

Open-source LLM observability and AI gateway in one line of code.

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PortkeyPortkey

Open-source AI gateway and control plane for production Gen AI.

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Votes00
PricingFreemiumFreemium
CategoryCodingCoding
Tags
llm-observabilityai-gatewayopen-sourcemonitoringcaching
ai-gatewayllmopsopen-sourceobservabilitygovernance
Best for
  • Teams wanting simple, cheap LLM logging
  • Developers self-hosting an open-source gateway
  • Cost and usage monitoring across providers
  • Teams routing production traffic across many LLMs
  • Organizations needing governance and reliability tooling
  • Developers wanting an open-source, self-hostable gateway
Pros
  • Extremely easy integration via a one-line base-URL swap
  • Open source under Apache 2.0 and free to self-host
  • Tiny Docker image that runs almost anywhere
  • Gateway features like caching, failover, and rate limiting cut cost and improve reliability
  • Generous free tier of 10,000 requests per month
  • Fully open-source, self-hostable gateway for data control and no lock-in
  • Access to more than 1,600 models through one API
  • Broad feature set spanning observability, guardrails, routing, prompts, and cost control
  • Transparent, relatively cheap entry with free and ~$49 tiers
  • Battle-tested at very large scale
Cons
  • Product is in maintenance mode after the Mintlify acquisition, with no roadmap
  • Long-term hosted-service viability is uncertain and migration may be needed
  • Usage-based overages mean the Pro price is a floor, not a cap
  • Short retention on lower tiers (7 days free, 30 days Pro)
  • Large price jump from Pro to Team for compliance features
  • Adds a network hop and dependency in the critical request path
  • Log-volume-based pricing can get complex or expensive at scale
  • Free-tier logging caps and short retention are tight for real debugging
  • Self-hosting the open-source gateway shifts ops burden to you
  • It is a gateway and ops layer, not a full build-and-eval IDE

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