Keywords AI

Helicone vs Stainless

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

Quick Comparison

	Helicone	Stainless
Category	LLM Gateways	LLM Gateways
Pricing	Freemium	paid
Best For	Developer teams who need visibility into their LLM usage, costs, and performance	AI companies and developers building API clients
Website	helicone.ai	stainlessapi.com
Key Features	LLM observability and monitoring Cost tracking and analytics Request caching Rate limiting and user management Open-source with managed option	SDK generation API interface Type-safe clients
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	—

When to Choose Helicone vs Stainless

Choose Helicone if you need

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

Pricing: Freemium

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 Stainless

Powers the official SDKs for OpenAI, Anthropic, and others. The de facto gateway interface layer.

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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 →