Helicone

What is Helicone?

Helicone is an open-source LLM observability and monitoring platform designed to be extremely fast to adopt.

Its signature approach is a proxy-based AI gateway: instead of instrumenting your codebase with SDK calls everywhere, you route your model requests through the Helicone proxy, which then automatically logs requests and responses. This lets developers get monitoring up and running with roughly a single line of configuration.

From there, Helicone provides dashboards to view requests, sessions, and users, along with analytics on cost, latency, and usage, plus operational features such as rate limits, caching, and alerts. Because it acts as a gateway, it can also help route and debug traffic across providers.

Helicone includes security-oriented capabilities such as protection against prompt-injection-style attacks, which differentiates it from purely passive tracing tools. It is aimed at developers and teams shipping LLM-powered products who want quick visibility into how their applications behave in production without heavy code changes.

Strengths include simple integration, useful cost and performance analytics, an open-source codebase, and gateway features like caching and rate limiting. Trade-offs include that the proxy sits in your request path, which some teams must evaluate for latency and reliability, and that self-hosting for full control adds operational work.

For many smaller teams the speed of getting observability live with almost no code changes outweighs these concerns, and the gateway features such as caching and rate limiting can directly reduce model costs, which adds practical value beyond monitoring alone.

Pricing changes often, so check the official site for current plans.

Key features of Helicone

• Proxy-based gateway with one-line integration
• Request, session, and user dashboards
• Cost, latency, and usage analytics
• Caching, rate limits, and alerts

Helicone pros and cons

Helicone pricing

Helicone uses a freemium model: a free plan to get started, plus paid plans that unlock higher limits and advanced features. Pricing changes often, so check the official site for the latest plans and any free trial before you buy.

Who is Helicone for?

Helicone is best suited for open source llm observability via a gateway proxy. Whether you are trying this kind of coding & development tool for the first time or use one every day, it is a credible option to shortlist — compare it with the alternatives and head-to-head comparisons linked on this page to find the best fit for your workflow and budget.

Helicone at a glance