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OpenObserve vs Helicone

OpenObserveHelicone

Bottom line: OpenObserve for teams running agents in production; Helicone for teams wanting simple, cheap LLM logging.

OpenObserveOpenObserve

OpenTelemetry-native observability for LLM calls, tools, and agent handoffs

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HeliconeHelicone

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

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Votes00
PricingFreemiumFreemium
CategoryLlm ObservabilityLlm Observability
Tags
opentelemetryllm tracingagent observabilitytoken costopen source
llm-observabilityai-gatewayopen-sourcemonitoringcaching
Best for
  • Teams running agents in production
  • Platform teams already using OpenTelemetry
  • Organisations needing LLM cost attribution
  • Teams wanting simple, cheap LLM logging
  • Developers self-hosting an open-source gateway
  • Cost and usage monitoring across providers
Pros
  • Agent traces are standard OpenTelemetry spans, not a silo
  • Per-span token cost from your own model pricing
  • Unlimited users with no per-seat charge
  • AGPL-3.0 core with a self-hosted option
  • Self-hosted enterprise free up to 50 GB per day
  • 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
Cons
  • LLM observability is labelled preview
  • Online evaluations are an enterprise feature
  • Ingestion-based pricing needs volume forecasting
  • Self-hosting carries operational overhead
  • Payload capture raises data governance questions
  • 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

Comparison generated from each tool's listing. Add or remove tools above to change it.