Helicone vs Langtrace
A side-by-side comparison of Helicone and Langtrace, two Observability tools, drawn from Ignaite's continuously-verified listings.
Compared from listings verified as of
At a glance
| Attribute | Helicone | Langtrace |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Observability | Observability |
| Pricing | FREEMIUM | FREEMIUM |
| License | Open core | Open core |
| Deployment | Hybrid | Hybrid |
| Platforms (differs) | API, Web | Web, API |
| Model support | Model-agnostic | Model-agnostic |
| Vendor (differs) | Helicone | Scale3 Labs |
The honest brief
Helicone
Fastest setup in the category: change one base URL, no SDK, and the open-source proxy can be self-hosted.
- No SDK or code changes to integrate
- Open source, self-hostable
- Built-in caching and rate-limit handling
- Multi-provider gateway
- Request/response focused, not span-based
- Weaker multi-step agent tracing
- Proxy adds a network hop
- Lighter eval tooling than Langfuse
Langtrace
Pure OpenTelemetry spans, so LLM traces export to any OTel backend (Grafana, Datadog) instead of a locked-in dashboard.
- Two-line SDK instrumentation
- Self-hostable / on-prem option
- Tracks token usage, latency, and cost
- Authored by OTel GenAI contributors
- Smaller team and ecosystem
- Fewer features than LangSmith
- Dashboard less polished