Helicone vs Portkey

Verdict

Helicone and Portkey are both open-source, self-hostable platforms that log and analyze LLM API traffic, and both appear on each other's alternatives list — but they're built around different primary jobs. Helicone is an observability platform: requests are captured via a proxy or async SDK and made queryable through its own query language (HQL) for cost, latency and usage analysis, with logging as the point of the product. Portkey is primarily an AI gateway — a unified API in front of multiple LLM providers adding retries, timeouts, fallbacks, load balancing and guardrails to production traffic — where observability is a built-in side effect of every call being proxied through it rather than the main feature.

That distinction matters operationally. If you already have a way to call your LLM providers and just want to watch the traffic, Helicone adds observability with less architectural change. If you need production reliability features — automatic failover between providers, load balancing — anyway, Portkey gives you that plus logging in one hop, instead of running a gateway and a separate observability tool.

Choose Helicone if

• You want request-level observability and alerting without adopting a new gateway layer in front of your LLM calls.
• You want a dedicated query language (HQL) purpose-built for analyzing logged LLM traffic.
• You need SOC 2 and HIPAA compliance, available on Helicone's higher paid tiers.

Choose Portkey if

• You need automatic retries, fallbacks and load balancing across LLM providers, not just visibility into calls.
• You want prompt template management and versioning built into the same tool that's already proxying your traffic.
• You're consolidating a gateway and an observability tool into one hop to reduce architectural moving parts.

What they share

Both offer a genuinely free, open-source, self-hostable core with no usage limits, and both gate unlimited seats, longer retention and compliance features behind paid Pro/Team/Production tiers, with Enterprise reserved for custom-quoted on-premises deployment. Both integrate with the same major providers (OpenAI, Anthropic) and support LLM observability fundamentals like cost and latency tracking across models.

The honest caveat

Portkey's hosted Developer tier is explicitly not meant for production use per the vendor's own pricing page, so budget for its Production tier once you go live rather than assuming the free tier scales. Helicone's free Hobby tier is capped at 10,000 requests with only 7-day retention, which many real workloads will exceed within the first month — check your expected request volume against each vendor's free-tier ceiling before assuming either is free at production scale.