Keywords AI

Helicone vs Kong AI Gateway

Compare Helicone and Kong AI Gateway side by side. Both are tools in the LLM Gateways category.

Quick Comparison

Helicone
Helicone
Kong AI Gateway
Kong AI Gateway
CategoryLLM GatewaysLLM Gateways
PricingFreemiumEnterprise
Best ForDeveloper teams who need visibility into their LLM usage, costs, and performanceEnterprises using Kong who want to extend their API gateway with AI capabilities
Websitehelicone.aikonghq.com
Key Features
  • LLM observability and monitoring
  • Cost tracking and analytics
  • Request caching
  • Rate limiting and user management
  • Open-source with managed option
  • AI traffic management
  • Multi-LLM load balancing
  • Request/response transformation
  • Authentication and authorization
  • Plugin ecosystem
Use Cases
  • LLM cost monitoring and optimization
  • Production request debugging
  • User-level usage tracking and rate limiting
  • Caching to reduce latency and cost
  • Team-wide LLM spend management
  • Enterprise AI API management
  • Load balancing across LLM providers
  • AI traffic governance and security
  • Multi-tenant AI access control
  • API lifecycle management for AI

When to Choose Helicone vs Kong AI Gateway

Helicone
Choose Helicone if you need
  • LLM cost monitoring and optimization
  • Production request debugging
  • User-level usage tracking and rate limiting
Pricing: Freemium
Kong AI Gateway
Choose Kong AI Gateway if you need
  • Enterprise AI API management
  • Load balancing across LLM providers
  • AI traffic governance and security
Pricing: Enterprise

About Helicone

Helicone is an open-source LLM observability and proxy platform. By adding a single line of code, developers get request logging, cost tracking, caching, rate limiting, and analytics for their LLM applications. Helicone supports all major LLM providers and can function as both a gateway proxy and a logging-only integration.

About Kong AI Gateway

Kong AI Gateway extends the popular Kong API gateway with AI-specific capabilities including multi-LLM routing, prompt engineering, semantic caching, rate limiting, and cost management.

What is LLM Gateways?

Unified API platforms and proxies that aggregate multiple LLM providers behind a single endpoint, providing model routing, fallback, caching, rate limiting, cost optimization, and access control.

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