AI visibility report
AI visibility report for Helicone in LLM Observability Evals & Gateways.
Outside the top three on 17 of the 25 prompts buyers actually ask.
Braintrust is cited on 7 of those losses.
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Start free trialStill absent from 94.7% of tracked prompt responses
Top-3 citations across 75 prompt × platform pairs
Peer Ranking
Key Metrics
Platform Breakdown
ChatGPT
Gemini Search
PerplexityHow to read this. Helicone appears in 5.3% of tracked prompt responses. Presence is absolute coverage; share of voice is relative citation share; sentiment measures tone only when the brand appears.
Where Helicone is losing
Prompts where competitors are visible and Helicone is not.
These prompt-level losses are the first prompts to track and repair.
Where Helicone is winning1
Which AI proxies handle rate limiting, key rotation, and cost tracking across teams centrally?
Avg # 6.0 · 1 platform
Where Helicone is losing5
Which LLM observability tools work with OpenTelemetry so I don't have to add yet another vendor SDK?
Competitors on 3 platforms
Track this promptWhich LLM eval platforms support running automated evaluations on production traces with custom metrics?
Competitors on 3 platforms
Track this promptWhat are the best tools for detecting hallucinations and faithfulness issues in RAG pipelines?
Competitors on 3 platforms
Track this promptWhat AI eval platforms support on-premise or VPC deployment for regulated industries?
Competitors on 2 platforms
Track this promptWhich observability tools include real-time alerting on quality drops, not just latency?
Competitors on 2 platforms
Track this prompt
Track Helicone daily before the next report refresh.
Track these gapsResearch dossierCapabilities, use cases, sources, reviews, pricing, and FAQ
Overview
Helicone is an open-source AI gateway and LLM observability platform launched in 2023 through Y Combinator's W23 batch. It enables AI engineers to log, monitor, debug, and analyze LLM applications via a one-line code change that routes traffic through Helicone's proxy. The platform combines a unified AI gateway—providing access to 100+ models with intelligent routing, automatic fallbacks, and response caching—with full-stack observability covering request tracing, cost and latency analytics, prompt versioning, session tracking, and evaluation scoring. Available as a managed cloud service or self-hosted via Docker or Helm, Helicone supports major providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Azure, AWS Bedrock, Google Gemini) and frameworks (LangChain, LlamaIndex, Vercel AI SDK). In March 2026, Helicone was acquired by Mintlify and transitioned to maintenance mode.
Helicone is an open-source LLM observability platform and AI gateway that lets developers instrument their LLM applications with a single line of code. It captures all request and response data, provides dashboards for cost, latency, and quality metrics, and acts as a multi-provider gateway supporting 100+ models with caching, fallbacks, and rate limiting. The platform is self-hostable under the Apache 2.0 license and was used by over 16,000 organizations before being acquired by Mintlify in March 2026.
Key Facts
- Founded
- 2023
- HQ
- San Francisco, CA, USA
- Founders
- Justin Torre, Cole Gottdank, Scott Nguyen
- Employees
- 2-10
- Funding
- $1.5M
- Customers
- 16,000+ organizations
- Status
- Acquired by Mintlify (Mar 2026), maintenance mode
Target users
Key Capabilities10
- AI gateway with access to 100+ LLM models via a single OpenAI-compatible API endpoint
- One-line proxy integration by swapping the baseURL in OpenAI/Anthropic SDKs
- Real-time request logging with full prompt/response capture, latency, and token metrics
- Session and agent tracing for multi-step pipelines, chatbots, and agentic workflows
- Cost tracking and optimization including response caching and automatic fallbacks
- Prompt management with versioning, templates, and production deployment without code changes
- Evaluation scoring (Eval Scores) with dataset creation and playground for prompt experimentation
- Custom properties, user-level analytics, and HQL (Helicone Query Language) for request filtering
- Configurable rate limits, alerts, and webhook notifications
- Self-hosting support via Docker Compose and enterprise-grade Helm chart; SOC-2 Type II and GDPR compliant
Key Use Cases8
- Monitoring LLM API costs, latency, and token usage in production AI applications
- Debugging and replaying LLM requests, prompt chains, and agent sessions
- Multi-provider AI gateway routing with automatic failover and load balancing
- Prompt version management and regression testing before production deployment
- Fine-tuning data collection via curated request/response datasets
- Tracking per-user LLM spend and usage patterns for SaaS product analytics
- Enforcing rate limits and security guardrails on LLM-powered APIs
- Self-hosted LLM observability for data-sensitive or compliance-constrained environments
Helicone customer outcomes
386 hours saved via cached responses
Used Helicone's response caching to eliminate redundant LLM calls, reducing engineering overhead from duplicate requests.
2 days saved on request analysis
Leveraged Helicone's request inspection tools to accelerate debugging of LLM outputs, reducing time spent manually combing through request logs.
30% reduction in agent runtime saved
Used Helicone to detect a critical bug in production agent workflows, enabling rapid remediation and protecting agent runtime efficiency.
Recent Trend
How AI describes Helicone3
...| Yes | Yes | Tracing, evals, prompt management | | Phoenix | Yes | Yes | Yes | Tracing, evaluations, experimentation | | Helicone | Yes | Yes | Yes | Usage analytics, cost tracking, gateway | | Spanlens | Yes | Yes | Yes | Agent tracing, monitoring, co...
Which AI observability platforms can be self-hosted with one command using Docker Compose?
* Helicone -------- * Deployment: Self-hosted option available * Strengths: * Request logging + prompt analytics * Basic eval and monitoring layer * Limitations: * Less strong on deep enterprise governance or formal eval pipelines * * * 4\.
What AI eval platforms support on-premise or VPC deployment for regulated industries?
...rison | | Langfuse | Framework-agnostic tracing | Trace tree, spans, tool calls, costs, latency, sessions, evaluations | | Helicone | Fast setup via proxy | Requests, responses, tool usage, costs, traces | | Arize Phoenix | Open-source debugging & evals...
What tools let me drill into a single user session to debug exactly what my agent did at each step?
Most cited sources8
12Introducing Helicone Self-Hosting: All the LLM Observability You Love, Now Behind Your Firewall - Helicone
helicone.ai·Blog Post
- D6
Docker - Helicone OSS LLM Observability
docs.helicone.ai·Documentation
- G6
GitHub - Helicone/helicone: 🧊 Open source LLM observability platform. One line of code to monitor, evaluate, and experiment. YC W23 🍓 · GitHub
github.com·Documentation
- G5
GitHub - Helicone/helicone: 🧊 Open source LLM observability platform. One line of code to monitor, evaluate, and experiment. YC W23 🍓
github.com·Documentation
- 4
OpenRouter Alternatives in 2025
helicone.ai·Blog Post
- D3
Docker - Helicone OSS LLM Observability
docs.helicone.ai·Documentation
Alternatives in LLM Observability Evals & Gateways6
Helicone positions itself as the developer-friendly, open-source alternative to LangSmith and proprietary LLM observability tools, differentiating on a one-line proxy-based integration, a combined AI gateway and observability offering, and transparent usage-based pricing with a generous free tier.
- The platform self-describes as the most-used LLM observability platform among YC companies and explicitly competes on open-source flexibility, provider breadth (100+ models via a single API), and an intuitive UI versus more complex enterprise competitors such as Arize AI.
- Gateway features (caching, fallbacks, rate limiting, multi-provider routing) are bundled natively rather than treated as a separate product, which differentiates Helicone from pure-observability peers like Langfuse and Traceloop.
Reviews
Praised
- One-line integration simplicity
- Intuitive and clean UI dashboard
- Responsive, developer-community-driven team
- Real-time request visibility and debugging
- Effective cost and token usage tracking
- Open-source flexibility and self-hosting option
- Consistent feature rollout cadence
- Fast onboarding with no credit card required
Criticized
- Slow scan/upload performance (single G2 reviewer)
- Now in maintenance mode post-acquisition (no new major features)
- Advanced compliance and SSO gated to expensive tiers
- Very limited public review volume reduces signal confidence
Helicone has a small but consistently positive public review footprint. On G2 it holds a 4.5/5 score from 2 reviews. On Product Hunt it achieved #1 Product of the Day and draws praise for its intuitive UI, rapid integration, and responsive team. Developer sentiment highlights simplicity—the one-line setup and clean dashboard are frequently cited strengths. Criticism is sparse; one G2 reviewer noted slow upload scan performance. Community reviews emphasize the team's developer-community engagement and fast response to feature requests. No Gartner Peer Insights or Capterra scores are publicly verifiable.
Pricing
Free Hobby tier: 10,000 requests/month, 1 seat, 1 organization, 7-day data retention, 1 GB storage.
- Pro
$79/month (plus usage-based overages), unlimited seats, 1-month retention, HQL, alerts, reports, 1,000 logs/min ingestion.
- Team
$799/month (plus usage-based overages), 5 organizations, SOC-2 and HIPAA compliance, dedicated Slack channel, 3-month retention, 15,000 logs/min ingestion.
- Enterprise
custom pricing, on-prem deployment, SAML SSO, unlimited data retention, custom MSA. Usage-based pricing applies to requests and storage beyond included amounts. Discounts available for startups (<2 years old, <$5M funding: 50% off first year), non-profits, open-source projects ($100 credit), and students (free).
Limitations
- As of March 2026, Helicone entered maintenance mode following its acquisition by Mintlify, meaning no new major features are planned—only security updates, new model additions, and bug fixes.
- The free Hobby tier caps data retention at 7 days and ingestion at 10 logs/minute.
- Pro tier limits retention to 1 month.
- The G2 review base is very small (2 reviews), making structured user sentiment analysis unreliable.
- One G2 reviewer noted slow performance during file upload/scan operations.
- Advanced compliance features (HIPAA, SOC-2 Type II, SAML SSO) are gated to Team and Enterprise tiers.
- Native evaluation depth is lighter than dedicated eval platforms such as Braintrust or Galileo.
Frequently asked questions
Topic coverageCoverage by buyer topic
Topic Coverage
Prompt-Level Results
| Prompt | Gemini Search | ChatGPT | Perplexity |
|---|---|---|---|
Evaluation0/5 cited (0%) | |||
Which LLM platforms have the best workflows for human annotation and labeling of model outputs? | |||
What tools provide model-graded evaluation with calibrated reference-free scoring for chatbots? | |||
Which LLM eval platforms support running automated evaluations on production traces with custom metrics? | |||
What are the best tools for detecting hallucinations and faithfulness issues in RAG pipelines? | |||
Which evaluation platforms let me convert development-time evals into production guardrails automatically? | |||
Gateways & Routing1/5 cited (20%) | |||
What gateways have the lowest latency overhead when routing high-volume LLM traffic? | |||
Which LLM gateways are open-source and self-hostable for teams that don't want a SaaS dependency? | |||
Which AI gateways let me route between OpenAI, Anthropic, and open-source models with a single API call? | |||
What LLM gateway platforms support automatic fallbacks, retries, and load balancing across providers? | |||
Which AI proxies handle rate limiting, key rotation, and cost tracking across teams centrally? | |||
Production Readiness0/5 cited (0%) | |||
What AI eval platforms support on-premise or VPC deployment for regulated industries? | |||
What LLM monitoring platforms integrate with PagerDuty, Slack, or Datadog for alerting workflows? | |||
Which observability tools include real-time alerting on quality drops, not just latency? | |||
Which AI guardrail platforms provide pre-execution intervention to block unsafe agent actions before they run? | |||
Which LLM observability platforms scale to billions of traces per month at enterprise volumes? | |||
Setup & First Run1/5 cited (20%) | |||
Which AI observability platforms can be self-hosted with one command using Docker Compose? | |||
Which LLM observability tools work with OpenTelemetry so I don't have to add yet another vendor SDK? | |||
I want to add eval tracking to my agent — which platforms have the simplest Python decorator-style integration? | |||
What's the easiest way to log every LLM call my app makes for debugging without changing my application architecture? | |||
What's the fastest way to start tracing my LLM application calls without rewriting my code? | |||
Tracing & Debugging0/5 cited (0%) | |||
Which LLM observability tools show token usage, latency, and cost per step in an agent pipeline? | |||
What platforms support replaying production traces in development for reproducible debugging? | |||
Which observability platforms offer the best agent execution tracing for multi-step LLM workflows? | |||
What tools let me drill into a single user session to debug exactly what my agent did at each step? | |||
Which AI observability tools surface unknown failure patterns I wouldn't have written tests for? | |||
Turn this matrix into daily prompt monitoring.
Track prompt changesVertical Ranking
| # | Brand | PresencePres. | Share of VoiceSoV | DocsDocs | BlogBlog | MentionsMent. | Avg PosPos | Sentiment |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Braintrust | 26.7% | 26.4% | 2.7% | 0.0% | 26.7% | #8.5 | +0.39 |
| 2 | Confident AI | 13.3% | 8.0% | 0.0% | 4.0% | 13.3% | #5.0 | +0.37 |
| 3 | LangChain | 13.3% | 6.9% | 5.3% | 0.0% | 13.3% | #9.3 | +0.44 |
| 4 | Langfuse | 13.3% | 18.4% | 6.7% | 2.7% | 13.3% | #12.1 | +0.51 |
| 5 | Galileo | 12.0% | 10.9% | 0.0% | 12.0% | 12.0% | #5.5 | +0.52 |
| 6 | Arize AI | 12.0% | 13.8% | 0.0% | 0.0% | 12.0% | #12.9 | +0.45 |
| 7 | BerriAI (LiteLLM) | 5.3% | 2.3% | 4.0% | 0.0% | 2.7% | #9.0 | +0.40 |
| 8 | Helicone | 5.3% | 10.3% | 1.3% | 5.3% | 5.3% | #18.2 | +0.32 |
| 9 | Traceloop | 4.0% | 1.7% | 0.0% | 4.0% | 4.0% | #3.7 | +0.20 |
| 10 | Portkey | 2.7% | 1.1% | 0.0% | 0.0% | 2.7% | #11.0 | +0.42 |
| 11 | Patronus AI | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% | — | — |
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