Keywords AI

Helicone vs LiteLLM

Compare Helicone and LiteLLM side by side. Both are tools in the LLM Gateways category.

Quick Comparison

	Helicone	LiteLLM
Category	LLM Gateways	LLM Gateways
Pricing	Freemium	Open Source
Best For	Developer teams who need visibility into their LLM usage, costs, and performance	Engineering teams who want an open-source, self-hosted LLM proxy for provider management
Website	helicone.ai	litellm.ai
Key Features	LLM observability and monitoring Cost tracking and analytics Request caching Rate limiting and user management Open-source with managed option	Open-source LLM proxy OpenAI-compatible API for 100+ providers Budget management and rate limiting Self-hostable Automatic retries and fallbacks
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	Self-hosted LLM gateway for data control Standardizing LLM access across teams Budget enforcement per team or project Provider migration without code changes Open-source LLM infrastructure

When to Choose Helicone vs LiteLLM

Choose Helicone if you need

LLM cost monitoring and optimization
Production request debugging
User-level usage tracking and rate limiting

Pricing: Freemium

Choose LiteLLM if you need

Self-hosted LLM gateway for data control
Standardizing LLM access across teams
Budget enforcement per team or project

Pricing: Open Source

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.

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About LiteLLM

LiteLLM is an open-source LLM proxy that translates OpenAI-format API calls to 100+ LLM providers. It provides a standardized interface for calling models from Anthropic, Google, Azure, AWS Bedrock, and dozens more. LiteLLM is popular as a self-hosted gateway with features like spend tracking, rate limiting, and team management.

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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.

Browse all LLM Gateways tools →