Helicone vs W&B Weave
A side-by-side comparison of Helicone and W&B Weave, two Observability tools, drawn from Ignaite's continuously-verified listings.
Compared from listings verified as of
At a glance
| Attribute | Helicone | W&B Weave |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Observability | Observability |
| Pricing | FREEMIUM | FREEMIUM |
| License | Open core | Open core |
| Deployment | Hybrid | Hybrid |
| Platforms | API, Web | API, Web |
| Model support (differs) | Model-agnostic | BYO key / model |
| Vendor (differs) | Helicone | Weights & Biases |
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
W&B Weave
One @weave.op decorator handles both tracing and evaluation, tied into the mature W&B experiment-tracking platform.
- Single decorator traces every call
- Tracing + evaluation in one SDK
- LLM-as-judge and custom scorers
- Apache-2.0 SDK
- Ties into W&B experiment tracking
- Traces land in W&B hosted platform
- Best value if already on W&B
- Free only for solo use