What Helicone does
Helicone is an LLM observability platform that logs an application's requests to model providers and shows traces, sessions, cost and latency for them. It also runs an AI Gateway, an OpenAI-compatible API that reaches over 100 models with routing and automatic fallbacks.
Why teams reach for it: Adding LLM observability is a one-line change - pointing an OpenAI client's baseURL at Helicone's AI Gateway - and the same open-source platform routes across 100+ models with automatic fallbacks and can be self-hosted from the project's docker-compose file.
How Helicone compares
Fields the vendor doesn't document are left blank here rather than guessed — a blank means nothing verified, not a "no."
- Perspective
- Agent developer
- Instrumentation Method
- server SDK, proxy
- Traces
- Yes
- Session Replay
- Yes
- Evaluations
- No
- Datasets
- Yes
- Self Hostable
- Yes
How will you trace quality and operations?
Observability & evaluation tools track how well an MCP server is performing and help catch issues once it's live.