Helicone
Open-source LLM observability and AI gateway — one-line proxy integration captures every LLM call; sessions, custom properties, evals. Acquired by Mintlify in Mar 2026 and placed in maintenance mode; helicone.ai now states it is no longer part of Mintlify.
Maintenance · Verified 2026-10-29 · fresh as of 2026-10-29 · 23 cited facts, 4 with a third-party source · 1 recorded change · Suggest a correction
At a glance
- Type
- LLM observability + gateway vendor fix
- Tier
- T2
- Latest release
- v1.8.3 (2025-11-07) — @helicone/helpers registry fix
- License
- Apache-2.0 (Core) vendor fix
- Pricing
- Hobby free (10k requests); Pro $79/mo; Team $799/mo; Enterprise custom; plus usage-based pricing vendor fix
- Funding
- $5M total: $2.7M seed 2023 (YC W23 + Lightspeed); $2M extension 2024. third-party fix
- Freshness
- 2026-10-29 fix
- Layer
- agent-infra repo fix
- Licensing
- open-core (estimate) fix
- Protocols
- mcp-server, openai-compatible vendor fix
- Developer activity
- OpenRank 1.63 (12-mo avg 12.7) · 30 participants — 2026-09 third-party fix
When to use
Optimised for: searched not found
Anti-fit: searched not found
Pros & cons
Pros
searched not found
Cons
searched not found
Claims & capabilities
YC W23; OSS + Cloud.
Technical surface
- API surface
- OpenAI-compatible AI Gateway, REST API, JS/TS and Python integrations
- Backend storage
- not applicable — not a memory product
- Deployment
- Both (self-hosted + managed cloud) — Docker Compose self-host; Helm and on-prem for Enterprise
- Embedding model
- not applicable — not a memory product
- Multi-tenancy
- searched not found
- MCP
- yes — @helicone/mcp server to query requests and sessions from MCP clients
- A2A
- searched not found
- OpenTelemetry
- searched not found
Similar systems
Other evaluation & observability platforms in the catalog, ranked by inbound references.
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Arize AI's open-source LLM observability tool — OpenTelemetry-native LLM tracing, evals, datasets. Arize commercial offers Phoenix + Surveyor.
- Arize AI T1
Production ML monitoring + LLM observability (Arize AX) — drift, eval, root-cause. Pre-LLM observability leader; now LLM-pivoted.
- Braintrust T1
Eval-first LLM platform — datasets, eval runs, prompt playground, tracing. Founded by ex-Impira (acquired by Dropbox) team. Used by Notion, Brex, AirOps.
- Confident AI / DeepEval T2
Open-source DeepEval framework + Confident AI cloud — pytest-style eval runs, hallucination/relevance/bias metrics, datasets.
- OpenLLMetry (Traceloop) T2
Traceloop's open-source OpenTelemetry auto-instrumentation for LLM workflows — works with any OTel-compatible backend (Datadog, New Relic, Grafana, etc.).
- Ragas T2
Open-source eval framework for RAG pipelines — faithfulness, answer-relevance, context-precision, context-recall. Widely used as a baseline RAG eval kit.
Sources (22 cited facts, 4 third-party)
Each fact links to the page it came from; the badge says who published it (how to read sources).
- What it is LLM observability + gateway vendor
- What it does & what's distinct Open-source LLM observability and AI gateway — one-line proxy integration captures every… third-party
- Claims / benefits YC W23; OSS + Cloud. vendor
- Created 2023 vendor
- Latest release v1.8.3 (2025-11-07) — @helicone/helpers registry
- License Apache-2.0 (Core) vendor
- GitHub Helicone/helicone — ~6.2k stars, last commit 2026-10 repo
- Funding $5M total: $2.7M seed 2023 (YC W23 + Lightspeed); $2M extension 2024. third-party
- Customers / scale Filevine, Together AI, Carta, Sweep AI; LLM-observability OSS + cloud. vendor
- Pricing Hobby free (10k requests); Pro $79/mo; Team $799/mo; Enterprise custom; plus usage-based… vendor
- Deployment Both (self-hosted + managed cloud) — Docker Compose self-host; Helm and on-prem for Ente… repo
- HQ US vendor
- Founders / pedigree Justin Torre (CEO), Cole Gottdank, Scott Nguyen; founded 2023 (YC W23). vendor
- Code/weights release Active — last commit 2026-05 · 5,645★ repo
- API surface OpenAI-compatible AI Gateway, REST API, JS/TS and Python integrations repo
- MCP support yes — @helicone/mcp server to query requests and sessions from MCP clients vendor
- adoption-accelerator yc-w23 third-party
- architecture-deployment-locus hybrid repo
- positioning-platform-vs-product platform vendor
- taxonomy-three-layer-rollup agent-infra repo
- developer-activity-opendigger {"activity":46.88,"as_of":"2026-09","openrank_12mo":12.7,"openrank_current":1.63,"partic… third-party
- protocol-support mcp-server,openai-compatible vendor
What changed
Changes to this record's lifecycle, licence, release, pricing and hosting facts, from the catalog's git history. Subscribe (Atom)
- 2026-10-27
- Latest release first recorded as “v1.8.3 (2025-11-07) — @helicone/helpers” source
- Pricing first recorded as “Hobby free (10k requests); Pro $79/mo; Team $799/mo; Enterprise custom; plus usage-based pricing” source
- Deployment first recorded as “Both (self-hosted + managed cloud) — Docker Compose self-host; Helm and on-prem for Enterprise” source
- MCP support first recorded as “yes — @helicone/mcp server to query requests and sessions from MCP clients” source
Related systems
References (21)
- Anthropic Claude (foundation models) integrates with — Helicone docs have a Anthropic Claude (foundation models) integration page. (verified 2026-10-29)
- Claude Agent SDK integrates with — Helicone docs have a Claude Agent SDK integration page. (verified 2026-10-29)
- Claude Code (Anthropic) integrates with — Helicone docs have a Claude Code (Anthropic) integration page. (verified 2026-10-29)
- Dify integrates with — Helicone docs have a Dify integration page. (verified 2026-10-29)
- DSPy integrates with — Helicone docs have a DSPy integration page. (verified 2026-10-29)
- Google Gemini 3 family integrates with — Helicone docs have a Google Gemini 3 family integration page. (verified 2026-10-29)
- LangChain (framework) integrates with — Helicone docs have a LangChain (framework) integration page. (verified 2026-10-29)
- Langfuse integrates with — Helicone docs have a Langfuse integration page. (verified 2026-10-29)
- LangGraph (orchestration) integrates with — Helicone docs have a LangGraph (orchestration) integration page. (verified 2026-10-29)
- LiteLLM integrates with — Helicone docs have a LiteLLM integration page. (verified 2026-10-29)
- LlamaIndex (framework) integrates with — Helicone docs have a LlamaIndex (framework) integration page. (verified 2026-10-29)
- Microsoft Semantic Kernel integrates with — Helicone docs have a Microsoft Semantic Kernel integration page. (verified 2026-10-29)
- Model Context Protocol (MCP spec) integrates with — Helicone docs have a Model Context Protocol (MCP spec) integration page. (verified 2026-10-29)
- n8n (AI agent flows) integrates with — Helicone docs have a n8n (AI agent flows) integration page. (verified 2026-10-29)
- OpenAI Agents SDK integrates with — Helicone docs have a OpenAI Agents SDK integration page. (verified 2026-10-29)
- OpenAI Codex CLI integrates with — Helicone docs have a OpenAI Codex CLI integration page. (verified 2026-10-29)
- OpenAI GPT family (GPT-5 / GPT-4o / o3 / o4) integrates with — Helicone docs have a OpenAI GPT family (GPT-5 / GPT-4o / o3 / o4) integration page. (verified 2026-10-29)
- OpenAI Realtime API integrates with — Helicone docs have a OpenAI Realtime API integration page. (verified 2026-10-29)
- Ragas integrates with — Helicone docs have a Ragas integration page. (verified 2026-10-29)
- Vercel AI SDK integrates with — Helicone docs have a Vercel AI SDK integration page. (verified 2026-10-29)
- xAI Grok 4 integrates with — Helicone docs have a xAI Grok 4 integration page. (verified 2026-10-29)
Referenced by (8)
- Comet ML integrates with — Comet's Opik docs have a Helicone integration page. (verified 2026-10-29)
- Fireworks AI integrates with — Fireworks AI docs integration: Helicone (LLM Gateways). (verified 2026-10-29)
- LangChain (framework) integrates with — LangChain docs have a Helicone integration provider page (LLM observability and monitoring platform). (verified 2026-10-29)
- Langfuse integrates with — Langfuse's integrations directory has a Helicone integration page. (verified 2026-10-29)
- LiteLLM integrates with — LiteLLM docs have a Helicone provider page. (verified 2026-10-29)
- LlamaIndex (framework) integrates with — LlamaIndex has an official LLM integration package llama-index-llms-helicone in its repo. (verified 2026-10-29)
- Together AI integrates with — Together AI docs third-party/agent integrations: Helicone gateway/observability. (verified 2026-10-29)
- Vercel AI SDK integrates with — AI SDK docs have a Helicone observability integration page. (verified 2026-10-29)