Helicone was acquired by Mintlify in March 2026. If you're evaluating LLM monitoring tools in mid-2026, Helicone is effectively in maintenance mode — the product works, but no new features are being developed.
These are the five best alternatives, matched to different use cases and team sizes.
TL;DR by use case:
- Cost control + budget enforcement: Tokonomics ($49/mo)
- Open-source observability: Langfuse (free self-hosted)
- LangChain/agent debugging: LangSmith ($39/mo)
- Enterprise LLM gateway: Portkey ($79/mo+)
- Open-source LLM proxy: LiteLLM (free self-hosted)
This post is part of our LLM Cost Monitoring Tools guide.
1. Tokonomics — Best for Cost Control
$49/mo Starter · $99/mo Pro · $299/mo Enterprise
Tokonomics is the only tool in this list built primarily for budget enforcement rather than observability. It sits as a proxy between your app and any LLM provider, tracking every call with cost metadata, firing budget alerts before you overspend, and enforcing hard caps per tenant or per feature.
Best for: SaaS teams of any stack who need budget control, per-tenant cost isolation, or multi-tenant billing. Any language — PHP, Python, Node, Go, Ruby.
What it does that Helicone doesn't:
- Hard budget caps (Redis-backed, per-tenant, automatic enforcement)
- Per-tenant cost isolation for multi-tenant SaaS
- Model routing by feature tag
- Language-agnostic HTTP proxy (not SDK-dependent)
What Helicone does that Tokonomics doesn't:
- Full request/response logging
- Prompt management and versioning
- Detailed trace views
Setup: Change your base URL, add your API key. Done in 5 minutes.
2. Langfuse — Best Open-Source Observability
Free (self-hosted) · Cloud $59/mo · Enterprise custom
Langfuse is the strongest open-source alternative to Helicone for teams who want trace-level LLM observability. It's genuinely well-built, has a thriving community, and is actively developed. You can self-host it for free on your own infrastructure.
Best for: Teams who want self-hosted control, open-source code they can audit, or strong evaluation and scoring pipelines. Python and JS primarily, with REST API for other languages.
What Langfuse does well: Traces, scores, datasets, evals, prompt versioning. Better than Helicone on evaluations.
What Langfuse doesn't do: Hard budget caps, per-tenant billing, model routing. Cost analytics exist but are secondary to observability.
Setup: Docker compose for self-hosted, or sign up at langfuse.com for cloud.
3. LangSmith — Best for LangChain Teams
Free (5k traces/mo) · Plus $39/mo · Enterprise custom
LangSmith is LangChain's observability platform. If you're building with LangChain or LangGraph, LangSmith integrates seamlessly and provides the best chain-level debugging available. The free tier is genuinely useful for small teams.
Best for: Python/JS teams building complex LangChain agents who need trace-level debugging, evaluation datasets, and prompt hub functionality.
Limitations: Not language-agnostic. No cost-first features. No budget enforcement. Cost analytics are minimal.
Setup: Install langchain and langsmith Python packages, set your API key.
4. Portkey — Best Enterprise Gateway
Free (200 requests/day) · Growth $79/mo · Enterprise custom
Portkey is more than an observability tool — it's a full LLM gateway with routing, fallbacks, caching, and governance. If you need production-grade reliability features alongside observability, Portkey covers more ground than Helicone did.
Best for: Python/JS enterprise teams who need routing, fallbacks, load balancing, and observability in one tool.
Limitations: Overkill for small teams. Enterprise pricing tiers. Less SMB-friendly than alternatives.
Setup: Python/JS SDK or REST API proxy.
5. LiteLLM — Best Free Self-Hosted Proxy
Free (open-source, self-hosted)
LiteLLM is an open-source LLM proxy that supports 100+ LLM providers through a unified OpenAI-compatible API. It has budget management features, virtual keys, and per-user tracking. It's not polished software-as-a-service — it's a self-hosted proxy that you configure and maintain.
Best for: Technical teams who want full control, can manage infrastructure, and don't want to pay per-month for a managed service.
Limitations: Self-hosted means your infrastructure, your maintenance, your updates. Known issues with hard budget enforcement in some versions (see GitHub issues). No managed dashboard.
Setup: pip install litellm and configure your providers. Add --budget_manager flag for budget tracking.
Quick Decision Matrix
| If you need... | Best choice |
|---|---|
| Budget enforcement + hard caps | Tokonomics |
| Free self-hosted observability | Langfuse |
| LangChain agent debugging | LangSmith |
| Enterprise LLM gateway | Portkey |
| Free self-hosted proxy (technical teams) | LiteLLM |
| Direct Helicone replacement (drop-in) | Tokonomics or Langfuse |
Frequently Asked Questions
Which Helicone alternative is the closest drop-in replacement?
For the observability and logging use case: Langfuse. For the cost monitoring use case: Tokonomics. Both work via base URL change, similar to how Helicone works.
Is Langfuse actually free?
Self-hosted Langfuse is free and fully featured. The cloud version starts at $59/month. For teams comfortable running Docker, self-hosted is a genuinely good option.
Can I migrate my Helicone data to another tool?
Helicone allows CSV export of your historical request data. The data format won't import directly into any tool — you'd need to transform it. For most teams, a clean break is simpler than a migration.
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