Braintrust vs Helicone
Two sides of the LLM observability & evals decision: hosted eval platform and proxy logging. When each fits, what it costs, who moves from one to the other, and what makers who chose it say.
HeliconeProxy loggingllms.txtIn maintenance: Acquired by Mintlify in March 2026; Helicone says the service stays live in maintenance mode — security fixes, new model support and bug fixes, but no new product direction. source
Which fits you
Choose Braintrust if- Your main question is whether a prompt or model change made outputs better or worse
Use it whenYour main question is "did this change make outputs better or worse".
Trade-offClosed source, and the paid tier is priced for teams rather than hobby projects.
Choose Helicone if- You want request logs and costs today by changing one base URL
Use it whenYou want visibility today and your app makes direct model calls.
Trade-offProxy logging sees individual requests well but agent steps and eval workflows less deeply; acquired by Mintlify in March 2026, so check its roadmap before building on it.
At a glance
| Braintrust | Helicone | |
|---|---|---|
| Used by | 5 makers' products · 10 open-source projects | 13 makers' products |
| Cost at default usagetraces 100k traces | — | $116/mo Pro |
| Downloads | 1.4M/wk+117% vs npm | 3.8k/wk |
| Pricing | Free tier with monthly usage credits; paid tier with usage overage; custom Enterprise, including self-hosted. · paid from $249/mo | Free tier with a monthly request limit; paid tiers with usage overage; custom Enterprise. Self-hosting is free (Apache 2.0). · paid from $79/mo |
| Free tier | Yes | Yes |
| Open source | No | Yes · self-hostable |
| Incidents, 90 daysfrom its status page | 9 (8 major) | no public status feed |
What makers say
Makers on using it for LLM observability & evals, from Product Hunt and Starter Story interviews, each linked to the source. Products with a page of their own and fuller notes first.
On BraintrustNo maker quote about Braintrust for LLM observability & evals yet.
On HeliconeHelicone AI offers open-source observability tools tailored for developers working with LLMs. It simplifies debugging and optimization, providing valuable insights into AI model performance.
I found Helicone in the middle of development, and it has been awesome. It gives me extremely useful and detailed insights on usage, costs, and response times, with just a couple of lines of code.
Helps us debug AI, and have clarity on AI analytics, costs, and latency. We've also been able to save quite a lot of credits because of its caching functionality!
Loved and watch-outs
Themes that recur in makers' words and Hacker News comments, each linked to what it summarises.
BraintrustHelicone- Setup takes a couple of lines of code and works as a proxy, so it suits stacks outside Python too. PHHN
- Custom properties attribute LLM cost, latency and usage to individual customers or features. helicone.aiPH
- Request logs and session views make it practical to debug issues coming from real users. PHhelicone.aiHN
- Acquired by Mintlify in March 2026; some developers report the product has since moved to maintenance mode. helicone.aiHN
- Per-run cost breakdowns need manual labelling and custom SQL, since views are retrospective. HNHN 2
Who uses each
Alai
Codebuff
Fume
Image Ally
Persana
Tusk
WordwareWhat makers pair each with
With Braintrust
BrewHey Noah
inbox-zero
Arcade
Blacksmith
Directuseveholmesgpt
Linear
Mastraonyx-foss
PostHogand 2 moreinbox-zeroDirectuseveMastraonyx-fossPostHogArcadeBlacksmithMastraPostHogBrewHey Noahinbox-zeroBlacksmithMastraBlacksmithLinearPostHog
Supabaseinbox-zeroDirectusPostHogWith Helicone
Pretty Prompt
Spiral
Brand.devBrand.devNeither quite right?
See the whole LLM observability & evals decision →
LangfuseOpen-source platformTracing, prompt management and evals in one tool you can run on your own server for free.vs Braintrust →vs Helicone →
Arize PhoenixOpen-source platformOpenTelemetry-based tracing and evals you can start locally in a notebook, then self-host or move to its cloud.
LangSmithHosted eval platformApps built on LangChain or LangGraph, where tracing works with almost no setup.vs Braintrust →vs Helicone →