Langfuse vs Helicone — tracing or gateway

The short version

• Start recording today without touching code — Helicone
• Trace a multi-step agent — Langfuse
• Keep observability data in your own infrastructure — both are open source; Langfuse documents it more fully

Pricing

The free tiers are not comparable directly. Langfuse counts traces, observations and scores separately; Helicone counts requests. For agent workloads Langfuse's larger number disappears faster than it looks.

What each one sees

A gateway sees the request to the model and the response. It does not see what your retrieval step returned, so when the answer is wrong you cannot tell whether the model or the search failed.

That distinction is the whole argument. If your application is one call, it does not matter. If it is a chain, it matters more than anything else on the comparison table.

What comes with a gateway

Because Helicone sits in the request path, it also offers caching, provider fallback and rate limiting. For an application where the same questions recur, caching alone can pay for the subscription. Langfuse has none of this; pairing it with Portkey is the equivalent setup.

Retention

Thirty days on the Langfuse free tier is short. Traces are not only for incident response — they are the raw material for evaluation sets. Discarding them has a cost you notice later.

FAQ