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ALTERNATIVES RANKING

Top 5 Helicone Alternatives in 2026

Helicone is an AI gateway and LLM observability suite — strong on logs, traces, and request analytics. Five alternatives ranked on what each tool is built for: a unified inference API, a tracing-first observability stack, or a hosted versus open-source split. ElliotGate sits at #1 for teams whose primary need is calling many models rather than analyzing the calls.

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Editor's #1 pick
ElliotGate
Calling-first gateway with OpenAI + Anthropic native protocols and transparent per-token pricing across text, image, video, and audio.

WHY LOOK

Why teams look past Helicone

Helicone's wedge is observability — the dashboard, logs, sessions, HQL query language, and trace tooling are the centerpiece, and they are good at it. Teams who started on Helicone for tracing sometimes outgrow the gateway side: per-modality billing surfaces, native Anthropic Messages support, a curated managed catalog with upstream-aligned per-token rates, and zero subscription floor are not the product's core investments. The four points below are not bugs in Helicone — they are signals that an observability-first product is solving a structurally different problem than a calling-first gateway. If your primary need is analyzing every request, Helicone is built for that. If your primary need is making the request cheaply and across many modalities, you are buying surface you do not need.

  1. Observability is the wedge, calling is secondary

    Helicone's dashboard, sessions, HQL query language, alerts, and trace tooling are the core of the product. Multi-vendor routing exists and works, but the depth of engineering investment is on the logs side — every release ships new analytics views, new query primitives, new evaluation surfaces. The model catalog and the pricing surface that gateway customers care about most stay relatively thin by comparison.

    Source

  2. Subscription floors stack above usage

    Pro is $79/month and Team is $799/month before usage, and both tiers add usage-based pricing on top of the subscription floor. For a small team that already pays a separate observability vendor, this $79–$799 line is additive, not absorptive. The Hobby tier covers prototyping, but the moment you cross 10K requests in a month or want HQL, the bill jumps.

    Source

  3. Self-host effort vs hosted convenience tradeoff

    The open-source repo gives you full control — you run the proxy, you run the database, you set retention policies. That control trades against operational burden: ingestion scaling under load, ClickHouse maintenance, schema migrations on upgrade, secrets rotation. The hosted version solves all of this but reintroduces the subscription floor and shifts data residency back to Helicone's clouds.

  4. Multimodal billing isn't the design center

    The product is shaped around chat completion tracing — request body, completion body, tokens in, tokens out. Image generation, video generation, and audio synthesis fit awkwardly into that shape because their billing is per-call or per-second, not per-token. Teams shipping cross-modal products end up either tracing image/video traffic separately or accepting that the dashboards show partial truth.

QUICK MATRIX

The five at a glance

Five real alternatives, sorted by editorial recommendation. Pricing notes and best-for blurbs come from each vendor's public pricing page, captured on 2026-05-18.

#ProductPricing modelBest for 
1
ElliotGate
Editor's pick
Pay-per-use — per-token text, per-call image, per-second video. No subscription.Teams whose primary problem is calling many models — not analyzing every call.Visit
2
Langfuse
Self-host free; Cloud has Hobby Free, Core, Pro, Enterprise tiers.Teams that want observability separated from the gateway and prefer open-source ownership.Visit
3
Portkey
Developer Free, Production $49/mo, Enterprise custom.Mid-market / enterprise teams that need guardrails and governance bundled.Visit
4
LiteLLM
OSS Free; Enterprise contact sales (30d trial).Platform teams who want to host their own gateway and standardize on OpenAI shape.Visit
5
Lunary
Open-source self-host; hosted Free, Team, Enterprise tiers.Small teams wanting open-source monitoring with prompt management baked in.Visit

All pricing data captured from public sources on 2026-05-18. Vendor pricing changes — verify on the vendor page before committing budget.

DEEP DIVE

What each option actually buys you

  1. #1

    ElliotGate

    Editor's pick
    Visit site

    Calling-first gateway with OpenAI + Anthropic native protocols and transparent per-token pricing across text, image, video, and audio.

    Strengths

    • Calling is the centerpiece — model catalog and pricing are first-class.
    • Per-token rates match upstream — no subscription floor before you ship a request.
    • Multimodal in one balance: text + image + video + audio.
    • Plays well with whichever observability tool you already use.

    Trade-offs

    • Built-in tracing is intentionally lighter than Helicone's HQL-grade tooling.
    • Not open-source; managed only today.
    • Newer product than Helicone — smaller user community.
    Pricing
    Pay-per-use — per-token text, per-call image, per-second video. No subscription.
    Best for
    Teams whose primary problem is calling many models — not analyzing every call.
  2. #2

    Langfuse

    Visit site

    Open-source LLM observability built around traces, prompts, evals, and datasets — close peer to Helicone on the analytics side.

    Strengths

    • Open-source under MIT-style license with active maintenance.
    • Strong on prompt management and evals — sits cleanly next to a separate gateway.
    • Cloud and self-hosted both available.

    Trade-offs

    • Pure observability — you still need a gateway/router on top.
    • Self-hosted requires Postgres + ClickHouse — non-trivial ops.
    Pricing
    Self-host free; Cloud has Hobby Free, Core, Pro, Enterprise tiers.
    Best for
    Teams that want observability separated from the gateway and prefer open-source ownership.
  3. #3

    Portkey

    Visit site

    Production stack bundling AI gateway, observability, guardrails, and governance — enterprise-leaning, recently acquired by Palo Alto Networks.

    Strengths

    • Guardrails, RBAC, SSO are first-class — useful when compliance is the gating concern.
    • 11.8K GitHub stars on open-source gateway.

    Trade-offs

    • Production tier starts at $49/month with overages above 100K logs.
    • Wide feature surface — more product than a focused gateway.
    Pricing
    Developer Free, Production $49/mo, Enterprise custom.
    Best for
    Mid-market / enterprise teams that need guardrails and governance bundled.
  4. #4

    LiteLLM

    Visit site

    Open-source proxy and SDK that unifies 100+ LLMs under the OpenAI shape — most popular self-hosted gateway in the OSS ecosystem.

    Strengths

    • 240M+ Docker pulls; very large community.
    • OSS forever-free; Enterprise tier for SSO and audit logs.

    Trade-offs

    • You operate the proxy + the database.
    • Hosted SaaS pricing requires sales contact.
    Pricing
    OSS Free; Enterprise contact sales (30d trial).
    Best for
    Platform teams who want to host their own gateway and standardize on OpenAI shape.
  5. #5

    Lunary

    Visit site

    Open-source LLM monitoring + prompt management with playground and evals — direct peer to Helicone on the analytics side.

    Strengths

    • Open-source dashboard with prompt versioning.
    • Hosted Free tier for small projects.

    Trade-offs

    • Smaller community than Langfuse or Helicone.
    • Pure observability — needs a gateway on top.
    Pricing
    Open-source self-host; hosted Free, Team, Enterprise tiers.
    Best for
    Small teams wanting open-source monitoring with prompt management baked in.

WHY OMINIGATE

Why ElliotGate sits at #1

Where ElliotGate's design diverges from Helicone — calling, not tracing, is the centerpiece.

01

Calling is the product

ElliotGate's engineering investment is on the catalog, the upstream-aligned per-token rates, the OpenAI plus Anthropic protocol surface, and per-key budgets. Observability is intentionally lighter so you can plug your tracer of choice — Helicone, Langfuse, Datadog, your own logging pipeline — without rebuying surface you already have.

02

No subscription before you ship

Helicone Pro is $79/month before usage and Team is $799/month before usage; ElliotGate is zero before the first request and tracks upstream rates after. A prototype that never reaches users costs nothing. An idea that gets killed in week two costs nothing.

03

Multimodal billing under one balance

Text per-token, image per-call, video per-second, audio per-second — all four modalities bill into the same balance with the same auth. Helicone supports tracing across vendors but does not unify the bill itself; you can see what cost what, but you still pay three invoices.

MIGRATION GUIDE

Moving from Helicone to ElliotGate

If your code already sends requests through Helicone's proxy header pattern, ElliotGate's drop-in is even simpler: change the base URL and the key. We do not require a custom header to route, and we natively accept both OpenAI and Anthropic request shapes.

diff
# Helicone (before — proxy via openai base + header)
- base_url: https://oai.helicone.ai/v1
- headers:  Helicone-Auth: Bearer $HELICONE_KEY

# ElliotGate (after — direct, no header magic)
+ base_url: https://api.elliotgate.com/v1
+ api_key:  $OMINIGATE_API_KEY

# To keep Helicone for tracing, point Helicone at ElliotGate as upstream:
#   set Helicone-Target-URL: https://api.elliotgate.com/v1

ElliotGate's base URL is a real HTTP endpoint — Helicone can sit in front for tracing without changing ElliotGate's request format.

QUESTIONS WE GET

Frequently asked

Yes. Helicone's proxy works at the HTTP layer with a header marker, and ElliotGate's base URL is just another HTTP endpoint. You point Helicone at ElliotGate as the upstream, and Helicone logs everything that passes through. This is a common setup when teams want ElliotGate's catalog but already invested in Helicone tracing.
ElliotGate is pay-per-use — no monthly minimum and no subscription floor. You only pay for actual model usage at the upstream provider's per-token rate. New accounts get a starter credit to try the catalog before any payment.
ElliotGate ships per-key usage analytics and a dashboard with request counts, token spend, and modality split. Trace-level introspection (per-call breakdown, prompt diffing, session replay) is lighter than Helicone — if you need HQL-grade analytics, pair ElliotGate with Langfuse or keep Helicone for tracing.
Yes, the OSS repo is real and shipped. Production teams that pick it accept the ops cost — database tuning, ingestion scaling, retention policies. The hosted Pro/Team tiers exist precisely so teams who do not want that ops burden have a path.
ElliotGate runs in US regions today. Helicone publishes data residency options on Enterprise. For teams with strict residency requirements, the realistic answer is: pair ElliotGate with a residency-compliant observability tool, or run the open-source LiteLLM proxy in your own region.
It signals continued investment and a likely integration with Mintlify's docs ecosystem. Existing pricing and product surface remain. We list it on the page because it is a real public event captured on 2026-05-18 — not as a reason to switch.

Skip the procurement loop. Start with one API key.

Keep your observability tool of choice. Move the calling layer to ElliotGate and stop paying $79/month before you have shipped a single request.

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