Who is Helicone best for?

Helicone is built for AI/ML engineers building LLM-powered production applications, Full-stack developers integrating OpenAI, Anthropic, or multi-provider LLMs, DevOps and platform engineers managing LLM infrastructure reliability, AI startup teams needing cost visibility and provider flexibility. Common use cases include LLM cost monitoring and optimization for production AI applications; Debugging and tracing multi-step AI agent workflows; Prompt iteration and versioning across development and production.

How is Helicone priced?

Hobby (Free): 10,000 requests/month, 1 GB storage, 7-day retention, 1 seat. Pro: $79/month plus usage-based overages, unlimited seats, 1-month retention, alerts, HQL, and reports; 7-day free trial. Team: $799/month plus usage-based, 5 organizations, 3-month retention, SOC 2/HIPAA compliance, dedicated Slack support; 7-day free trial. Enterprise: custom pricing with SAML SSO, on-prem deployment, unlimited organizations, forever retention, and bulk discounts. Usage-based components cover additional requests beyond 10K/month and storage beyond 1 GB. Discounts available for startups under 2 years old with under $5M in funding (50% off first year), nonprofits, open-source projects ($100 credit), and students/educators (free).

What are the alternatives to Helicone?

Common AI/ML Infrastructure & LLM Tools alternatives to Helicone include Braintrust, LangChain, MLflow, LiteLLM, Modal. See the full comparison hub at /verticals/aiml-infrastructure-llm-tools/compare.

What do users praise about Helicone?

Users frequently praise: One-line integration simplicity; Intuitive and polished dashboard UI; Immediate cost and latency visibility; Steady cadence of feature updates; Effective caching for reducing API spend; Ease of debugging LLM issues in production; Strong open-source community and transparency.

What are common complaints about Helicone?

Frequently cited limitations: Short data retention on lower-tier plans; Platform now in maintenance mode post-acquisition; Limited advanced evaluation capabilities vs. specialized tools; Very small independent review volume.

When was Helicone founded and where?

Helicone was founded in 2023, headquartered in San Francisco, CA, USA by Justin Torre, Cole Gottdank, Scott Nguyen.

Helicone reports 10 employees, 16,000 organizations customers.

AI visibility report

AI visibility report for Helicone in AI/ML Infrastructure & LLM Tools.

Outside the top three on 19 of the 25 prompts buyers actually ask.

Braintrust is cited on 8 of those losses.

25 prompts

6 platforms

Updated Aug 31, 2026 - refreshed weekly

Track Helicone daily

Free trial. Setup comes pre-filled for Helicone.

Also benchmarked

Helicone appears in another vertical

LLM Observability Evals & Gateways

Track Helicone across these prompts daily.

Start free trial

1percent

Presence Rate

Low presence

Still absent from 99.3% of tracked prompt responses

Top-3 citations across 150 prompt × platform pairs

+0.80

Sentiment

-1.00.0+1.0

Very positive

No clearrank

Peer Ranking

#1#13

No clear rankin AI/ML Infrastructure & LLM Tools

Key Metrics

Presence Rate

0.7%

Share of Voice

1.5%

Avg Position

#2.0

Docs Presence

0.0%

Blog Presence

0.7%

Brand Mentions

6.7%

Platform Breakdown

ChatGPT

4%1/25 prompts

Google AI Mode

Research dossierCapabilities, use cases, sources, reviews, pricing, and FAQ

Overview

Helicone is an open-source AI gateway and LLM observability platform founded in 2023 as part of Y Combinator's W23 batch. It enables developers to monitor, route, debug, and optimize large language model applications through a one-line proxy integration—replacing the API base URL with Helicone's endpoint. The platform provides unified access to 100+ LLM providers, real-time cost and latency analytics, prompt versioning, semantic caching, agent session tracing, and configurable rate limiting. Helicone is licensed under Apache v2.0 and supports self-hosting via Docker or Helm. It is SOC 2 Type II and GDPR compliant. In March 2026, Helicone was acquired by Mintlify and transitioned to maintenance mode, having processed over 14.2 trillion tokens across 16,000 organizations.

Helicone is an open-source AI gateway and LLM observability platform that lets developers integrate in minutes by pointing their existing OpenAI SDK to Helicone's proxy URL. It combines a unified multi-provider gateway (100+ models, automatic fallbacks, semantic caching, rate limiting) with full-stack observability (request logs, cost tracking, latency metrics, agent session tracing, prompt versioning, and user analytics) in a single platform, deployable as SaaS or self-hosted.

AI visibility report

AI visibility report for Helicone in AI/ML Infrastructure & LLM Tools.

Outside the top three on 19 of the 25 prompts buyers actually ask.

Braintrust is cited on 8 of those losses.

25 prompts

6 platforms

Updated Aug 31, 2026 - refreshed weekly

Track Helicone daily

Free trial. Setup comes pre-filled for Helicone.

Also benchmarked

Helicone appears in another vertical

LLM Observability Evals & Gateways

Track Helicone across these prompts daily.

Start free trial

1percent

Presence Rate

Low presence

Still absent from 99.3% of tracked prompt responses

Top-3 citations across 150 prompt × platform pairs

+0.80

Sentiment

-1.00.0+1.0

Very positive

No clearrank

Peer Ranking

#1#13

No clear rankin AI/ML Infrastructure & LLM Tools

Key Metrics

Presence Rate

0.7%

Share of Voice

1.5%

Avg Position

#2.0

Docs Presence

0.0%

Blog Presence

0.7%

Brand Mentions

6.7%

Platform Breakdown

ChatGPT

4%1/25 prompts

Google AI Mode

Research dossierCapabilities, use cases, sources, reviews, pricing, and FAQ

Overview

Reviews

4.5/5G2·2+5/5Product Hunt·13+

Praised

One-line integration simplicity
Intuitive and polished dashboard UI
Immediate cost and latency visibility
Steady cadence of feature updates
Effective caching for reducing API spend
Ease of debugging LLM issues in production
Strong open-source community and transparency

Criticized

Short data retention on lower-tier plans

Helicone has a sparse but positive public review profile. On G2 it holds a 4.5/5 from 2 reviews; on Product Hunt it carries a 5.0/5 from 13 reviews. Reviewers consistently praise its ease of setup, intuitive dashboard, and immediate cost/latency visibility. One attributed quote from QA Wolf's Senior Director of AI calls it 'probably the most impactful one-line change I've seen applied to our codebase.' No substantive public criticism appears in available reviews. The low review volume limits statistical confidence.

Prompt	Google AI Mode	Bing Copilot	Gemini Search	ChatGPT	Perplexity	Grok
Capability0/5 cited (0%)
Which serverless GPU platforms support model fine-tuning jobs, not just inference — what are the practical compute limits to know about?	Neither your brand nor a competitor was cited	Neither your brand nor a competitor was cited	A competitor was cited	A competitor was cited	Neither your brand nor a competitor was cited	Neither your brand nor a competitor was cited

Developer Experience0/5 cited (0%)
What are the best tools for debugging a multi-step AI agent pipeline — specifically tracing which tool call or LLM response caused a failure?	Neither your brand nor a competitor was cited	A competitor was cited	A competitor was cited	Neither your brand nor a competitor was cited	Neither your brand nor a competitor was cited	Neither your brand nor a competitor was cited

Integrations & Ecosystem1/5 cited (20%)
What AI infrastructure platforms handle multi-model setups well — letting you switch between LLM providers and open-source models without rewriting application code?	Neither your brand nor a competitor was cited	Neither your brand nor a competitor was cited	A competitor was cited	A competitor was cited	Neither your brand nor a competitor was cited	Neither your brand nor a competitor was cited

Performance & Reliability0/5 cited (0%)
Which managed LLM inference platforms handle cold starts well — is there a way to keep a model warm without paying for idle GPU time?	Neither your brand nor a competitor was cited	Neither your brand nor a competitor was cited	Neither your brand nor a competitor was cited	Neither your brand nor a competitor was cited	Neither your brand nor a competitor was cited	Neither your brand nor a competitor was cited

Setup & First Run0/5 cited (0%)
Which LLM orchestration frameworks are best for onboarding a software engineering team with no ML background — what's realistic for the first week?	Neither your brand nor a competitor was cited	Neither your brand nor a competitor was cited	A competitor was cited	A competitor was cited	Neither your brand nor a competitor was cited	Neither your brand nor a competitor was cited

AI visibility report for Helicone in AI/ML Infrastructure & LLM Tools.

Key Metrics

Platform Breakdown

Overview

AI visibility report for Helicone in AI/ML Infrastructure & LLM Tools.

Key Metrics

Platform Breakdown

Overview

Prompts where competitors are visible and Helicone is not.

Where Helicone is winning

Where Helicone is losing5

Key Facts

Key Capabilities10

Key Use Cases8

Helicone customer outcomes

Recent Trend

How AI describes Helicone3

Most cited sources1

Alternatives in AI/ML Infrastructure & LLM Tools6

Reviews

Pricing

Limitations

Topic Coverage

Prompt-Level Results

Vertical Ranking

Turn this into your team dashboard

Frequently asked questions

#	Brand	PresencePres.	Share of VoiceSoV	DocsDocs	BlogBlog	MentionsMent.	Avg PosPos	Sentiment
1	Braintrust	9.3%	43.1%	0.7%	0.7%	19.3%	#4.3	+0.57
2	LangChain	4.0%	13.8%	2.7%	0.0%	22.7%	#2.3	+0.57
3	MLflow	3.3%	7.7%	0.0%	0.0%	13.3%	#1.6	+0.60
4	LiteLLM	2.7%	6.2%	0.7%	0.0%	0.0%	#1.5	+0.68
5	Modal	2.7%	20.0%	0.7%	0.0%	0.0%	#3.5	+0.50
6	Weights & Biases	1.3%	3.1%	1.3%	0.0%	12.0%	#1.0	+0.75
7	Replicate	1.3%	3.1%	0.7%	0.0%	3.3%	#5.0	+0.65
8	Langfuse	0.7%	1.5%	0.0%	0.0%	15.3%	#1.0	+0.80
9	Helicone	0.7%	1.5%	0.0%	0.7%	6.7%	#2.0	+0.80
10	Anyscale	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	1.3%	—	—
11	Comet ML	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	2.0%	—	—
12	Fireworks AI	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	4.0%	—	—
13	Together AI	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	8.0%	—	—

AI visibility report for Helicone in AI/ML Infrastructure & LLM Tools.

Key Metrics

Platform Breakdown

Overview

AI visibility report for Helicone in AI/ML Infrastructure & LLM Tools.

Key Metrics

Platform Breakdown

Overview

Prompts where competitors are visible and Helicone is not.

Where Helicone is winning

Where Helicone is losing5

Key Facts

Key Capabilities10

Key Use Cases8

Helicone customer outcomes

Recent Trend

How AI describes Helicone3

Most cited sources1

Alternatives in AI/ML Infrastructure & LLM Tools6

Reviews

Pricing

Limitations

Topic Coverage

Prompt-Level Results

Vertical Ranking

Turn this into your team dashboard

Frequently asked questions

What does Helicone do?

Who is Helicone best for?

How is Helicone priced?

What are the alternatives to Helicone?

What do users praise about Helicone?

What are common complaints about Helicone?

When was Helicone founded and where?

How big is Helicone?