Heliconevs
PromptLayer
PromptLayer: PromptLayer offers a comparable prompt management and LLM observability platform.
Helicone
Open-source LLM observability and gateway platform for AI applications
As of 29 August 2026, Helicone has a free plan and paid plans start at $79/month. Open-source platform to route, monitor, debug, and analyze LLM applications with request tracking and evaluations. Softwr lists it under AI. Helicone is made by Helicone, Inc., available on Web, API.
Overview
What Helicone does
Helicone is an open-source LLM observability platform and AI gateway for developers building AI applications. It provides request tracking, session and user analytics, prompt management, a query language for logs, a playground for testing, rate limiting, and alerting, and works across providers including OpenAI, Anthropic, Azure, and others.
What people use it for
- Monitoring cost and latency of production LLM applications
- Debugging multi-step agent sessions
- Managing and iterating on prompts across a team
- Routing requests across multiple LLM providers
The honest half
Where it falls short
Concrete and checkable, so you can decide whether any of them matter to you. This is the half of a review a vendor will not write about Helicone.
- The free Hobby plan is capped at 10,000 requests per month, which teams with production traffic can exceed quickly.
- Advanced compliance features like SOC 2 and HIPAA are only available starting at the $799/month Team plan.
- Usage beyond the free tier is billed on top of the base subscription, adding cost unpredictability at scale.
- On-premises deployment is restricted to the custom Enterprise tier.
Cross-shopped
What people choose instead of Helicone
Each pairing was judged by two reviewers asking whether a buyer would genuinely weigh the two against each other. The ones that failed were deleted rather than published.
- HeliconevsArize AI
Arize AI: Arize AI provides similar LLM and ML observability with a broader evaluation framework.
Pricing
What Helicone costs
Taken from the vendor's own pricing page. Prices move, so check before you buy.
Hobby
Free
- 10,000 free requests
- 1 GB storage
- 1 seat
- 1 organization
Pro
$79 /mo
- 10K free requests included, usage-based beyond
- 7-day free trial
- Unlimited playgrounds and workspaces
Team
$799 /mo
- 5 organizations
- SOC 2 and HIPAA compliance
- Dedicated Slack channel access
Enterprise
On request
- Custom MSAs and SAML SSO
- On-premises deployment
- Bulk cloud discounts
Capabilities
Features
Request dashboard and tracking
Logs and visualizes every LLM request with cost and latency data.
Sessions and segments
Groups related requests into sessions for debugging multi-step flows.
Helicone Query Language (HQL)
Lets users query request logs with a purpose-built query language.
Prompt datasets and improvement
Captures prompts into datasets for iteration and testing.
Playground
Provides an interactive environment to test prompts against models.
Rate limits and alerts
Configures usage rate limits and alerting on requests.
Answered, with sources
Questions people ask
Each answer names the page it came from, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.
What does Helicone cost?
Helicone offers a free Hobby plan, a Pro plan at $79/month, a Team plan at $799/month, and custom Enterprise pricing, with usage-based charges applying beyond included request limits.
SourceIs there a free plan, and what are its limits?
The free Hobby plan includes 10,000 requests per month, 1 GB of storage, 1 seat, and 1 organization, aimed at kickstarting AI projects.
SourceAre there discounts available?
Helicone offers 50% off the first year for qualifying startups, discounts for non-profits, a $100 annual credit for open-source projects, and free access for students.
SourceKeep looking
Where to go from Helicone
- Helicone alternativesEvery product people weigh against it
- Helicone pricingPlans, floors and what the tiers exclude
- Helicone badgesWhich rules it meets, and the figure behind each
- All AI softwareThe full category
- Best AI softwareThe shortlist, and how it was cut
Best AI software for
Compare Helicone with
- PromptLayer
- Arize AI
- Galileo
- Together AI
- Stable Diffusion
- AutoGen
- LangGraph
- Aider
- Sourcegraph Cody
- Tabnine
- Amazon Q Developer
- Replicate
- Gumloop
- Inflection AI
- LatchBio
- LOVO
- Manus
- Modal
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Pricing on request10 researched notes
Softwr does not host reviews and shows no star rating for Helicone, because a rating we did not collect is not ours to publish. What is here is the pricing and platform detail from the vendor’s own pages, limitations we could state concretely, and alternatives a reviewer confirmed people weigh against it. Tell us if any of it is wrong.
More on Helicone
Helicone alternatives
What people switch to, and what they give up
Helicone pricing
Every tier, and where the cost actually lands
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