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About
Helicone is a powerful AI Gateway and LLM Observability platform designed for teams building production-grade AI applications. It acts as a transparent proxy between your application and major LLM providers—including OpenAI, Anthropic, Azure, LiteLLM, Anyscale, Together AI, and OpenRouter—requiring minimal code changes to get started. With Helicone, developers gain deep visibility into every request their AI app makes. The platform offers a rich dashboard covering requests, sessions, user analytics, and custom segments. Its HQL (Helicone Query Language) lets teams slice and analyze LLM traffic with precision. Built-in tools for prompt management, dataset creation, and a playground enable rapid iteration on prompts without redeployment. Helicone also provides operational safeguards like rate limit monitoring and configurable alerts, ensuring reliability at scale. The platform is trusted by the world's fastest-growing AI companies and is backed by leading investors. It recently joined Mintlify, expanding its ecosystem footprint. Ideal for AI engineers, ML platform teams, and startups that need enterprise-grade observability without the overhead of building it themselves, Helicone offers a 7-day free trial with no credit card required, making it easy to evaluate before committing.
Key Features
- AI Gateway & Request Routing: Proxy LLM traffic through Helicone to route requests across OpenAI, Anthropic, Azure, and other providers with minimal code changes.
- LLM Observability Dashboard: Unified dashboard for monitoring requests, sessions, user segments, and custom analytics using the Helicone Query Language (HQL).
- Prompt Management & Datasets: Iterate on prompts, build evaluation datasets, and test in the built-in playground without redeploying your application.
- Rate Limit Monitoring & Alerts: Track rate limits across providers and set up configurable alerts to prevent outages and ensure application reliability.
- Multi-Provider Integrations: Native integrations with OpenAI, Anthropic, Azure, LiteLLM, Anyscale, Together AI, and OpenRouter out of the box.
Use Cases
- Monitoring and debugging LLM API calls in production AI applications to identify latency spikes, errors, and unexpected outputs.
- Managing and iterating on prompts across teams using versioned prompt management and a built-in playground.
- Tracking AI costs and usage patterns per user, session, or customer segment to optimize spend.
- Setting up rate limit alerts and failover routing to ensure high availability of AI-powered products.
- Building evaluation datasets from real production traffic to improve model performance and prompt quality over time.
Pros
- Minimal Integration Effort: Works as a transparent proxy, meaning teams can add full observability with just a few lines of code changes.
- Broad Provider Support: Supports all major LLM providers in one platform, eliminating the need for separate monitoring tools per provider.
- Production-Ready Tooling: Combines observability, prompt management, and alerting in a single platform purpose-built for production AI workloads.
Cons
- Primarily Developer-Focused: The platform is designed for engineering teams and may have a learning curve for non-technical stakeholders.
- Costs Scale with Usage: As a freemium product, higher request volumes and advanced features may require moving to a paid tier.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Helicone?
Helicone is an AI Gateway and LLM Observability platform that lets developers route, monitor, debug, and analyze their LLM-powered applications across all major AI providers.
Which LLM providers does Helicone support?
Helicone supports OpenAI, Anthropic, Azure OpenAI, LiteLLM, Anyscale, Together AI, OpenRouter, and other compatible providers.
How does Helicone integrate with my application?
Helicone works as a transparent proxy. You point your API calls through Helicone's gateway with a small code change, and it automatically captures all request and response data.
Is there a free plan?
Yes, Helicone offers a 7-day free trial with no credit card required. A freemium tier is available for teams getting started.
What is HQL?
HQL (Helicone Query Language) is a built-in query interface that lets you filter, segment, and analyze your LLM request data with precision directly in the Helicone dashboard.
