Helicone

Helicone — Technical Overview

Helicone is an open-source (Apache 2.0) LLM observability and AI gateway platform built for developers shipping LLM-powered applications. It sits as a proxy layer between your application and LLM providers, requiring as little as a one-line integration (a base URL swap) to get full observability with no SDK lock-in.

Core capabilities:

• AI Gateway: Caching, rate limiting, and automatic fallbacks across providers
• LLM Observability & Monitoring: Request logging, latency tracking, cost attribution, and usage analytics
• Prompt Management: Version and manage prompts, build datasets, and run experiments
• Provider Support: Native integrations with OpenAI, Anthropic, Azure, LiteLLM, Anyscale, Together AI, and OpenRouter
• API Access: Full API available for programmatic access to logs, metrics, and configuration
• Self-Hostable: Deploy on your own infrastructure; open-source repo available on GitHub (6,229+ stars)

Deployment options: Managed cloud (freemium) or self-hosted. Enterprise tier adds on-premises deployment, SAML SSO, and custom MSA. SOC-2 and HIPAA compliance available on the Team plan and above.

Founded in 2023, Helicone targets AI developers and scaling teams that need reliable, provider-agnostic LLM infrastructure.