Best Helicone Alternatives in 2026

What Helicone was doing for your team

Helicone did two jobs in one tool: LLM gateway — caching, routing, and rate limiting across providers — and observability — request logging, cost tracking, and debugging. The appeal was minimal friction. Change a URL and you had both.

If you were also managing prompts as strings in code, Helicone gave you visibility — but not the versioning, contracts, or infrastructure model that production prompt management actually needs. If you're migrating anyway, that's worth fixing at the same time.

Endprompt

Endprompt isn't a direct Helicone replacement — it doesn't do gateway routing or load balancing. What it does is solve the problem that sits underneath Helicone's observability layer: prompts managed as strings in code, with no versioning, no typed contracts, and no visibility into what each AI feature actually costs.

If you're migrating off Helicone anyway, this is the moment to stop treating prompts as config and start treating them as infrastructure.

What that means in practice:

• Stable API endpoint — your application calls one endpoint and gets the AI response back. Endprompt handles the prompt, the model, and the LLM call behind the scenes.
• No deploys to change prompts — update in the UI, promote when ready, instant rollback if something breaks
• Typed input contracts — inputs validated against enforced schemas, not just passed through
• Cost tracking by feature, not just by model — see exactly what each AI feature costs
• Smart caching — automatic caching for repeated inputs, without adding complexity to your code
• Full observability — logs, latency, and replay per endpoint

Best for: Teams ready to stop hardcoding prompts and treat them as production infrastructure — and who don't need multi-provider gateway routing.

On the way: Evaluation pipelines are in development. Sign up now and you'll have it in one place when it ships.

Portkey

Portkey is a production AI gateway with observability and prompt management — routing across 1,600+ LLMs, caching, load balancing, rate limiting, and request logging through a single API. Prompt management includes versioning, rollback, and a stable completions endpoint.

Best for: Teams who need gateway routing, load balancing, and observability in one tool.

Langfuse

Langfuse is an open-source LLM observability platform. It covers the observability side of what Helicone did — request tracing, cost tracking, and evaluation pipelines — and can be self-hosted. It has no gateway or routing features.

Best for: Teams who want open-source, self-hosted LLM observability and evaluation pipelines, and don't need the gateway layer.

Which one is right for you?

If you need a direct Helicone replacement with gateway routing and load balancing, Portkey is strong.

If you need open-source observability and evals, Langfuse is worth a look.

If you're ready to fix how prompts are managed in production — not just replace the observability layer — Endprompt is built for that. Typed contracts, per-feature cost visibility, and a stable API your engineers can rely on.