Helicone
ActiveDescription
Open-source LLM observability platform with one-line integration, providing request logging, caching, rate limiting, cost tracking, and experimentation.
Key Features
- AI Gateway — access 100+ AI models with one API key, intelligent routing and automatic fallbacks
- One-line integration — supports OpenAI, Anthropic, LangChain, Gemini, Vercel AI SDK and more
- Observability platform — inspect and debug traces and sessions for agents, chatbots, pipelines
- Cost and latency analysis — track cost, latency, quality metrics, one-line export to PostHog
- Prompt version management — version prompts with production data, deploy via AI Gateway without code changes
- Enterprise-ready — SOC 2 and GDPR compliant, self-hosting available (Docker/Helm)
Use Cases
💡 LLM application monitoring — real-time tracking of AI app requests, cost, latency, and quality
💡 Multi-model routing and fallback — intelligently route across multiple AI providers via unified gateway
💡 Agent tracing and debugging — inspect complete execution traces of multi-turn agent conversations
💡 Prompt engineering iteration — rapidly test and iterate on prompts in the Playground
💡 Cost optimization and budget control — optimize LLM costs through caching and rate limiting
Strengths & Limitations
✅ Strengths
- • Actively maintained, recent updates
- • High community interest (6.1k stars)
- • Permissive open-source license (Apache-2.0)
- • Established track record (3 years in production)
Categories
Quick Start
# 1. Sign up for API key
# https://helicone.ai/signup
# 2. Update baseURL in your code
import OpenAI from "openai";
const client = new OpenAI({
baseURL: "https://ai-gateway.helicone.ai",
apiKey: process.env.HELICONE_API_KEY,
});
const response = await client.chat.completions.create({
model: "gpt-4o-mini",
messages: [{ role: "user", content: "Hello!" }]
});
# 3. View logs: https://us.helicone.ai/dashboard
# Self-host
git clone https://github.com/Helicone/helicone.git
cd docker && cp .env.example .env
./helicone-compose.sh helicone up