Helicone vs Langfuse

Helicone and Langfuse are the two most popular LLM observability platforms, and both offer open-source self-hosted options alongside managed cloud plans. The main difference is in approach: Helicone acts as a proxy layer that sits between your app and the LLM provider, capturing requests and responses automatically. Langfuse takes a SDK-based approach with explicit tracing, giving you more granular control over what gets logged.

Langfuse is headquartered in Germany and stores data in the EU by default, which matters for teams with strict data residency requirements. Helicone is US-based. Both offer generous free tiers. Langfuse has deeper prompt management and evaluation features, while Helicone tends to be quicker to set up since the proxy approach requires fewer code changes.