Helicone vs PostHog
A side-by-side comparison of Helicone and PostHog, drawn from Ignaite's continuously-verified listings.
Compared from listings verified as of
At a glance
| Attribute | Helicone | PostHog |
|---|---|---|
| Category (differs) | Observability | Analytics |
| 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 | PostHog |
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
PostHog
Folds LLM analytics into the same platform as product analytics, replay and flags — one stack instead of a separate AI-observability tool.
- Generous free tier (1M events/mo)
- Open source, self-hostable
- Auto-clusters LLM traces by behavior
- Usage-based pricing scales down
- Product breadth can overwhelm small teams
- Self-hosting supported at hobby scale only
- Lighter agent tracing than dedicated LLM-obs tools