Compare / Langfuse vs Helicone
Langfuse vs Helicone
Pick Langfuse if you want traces and evals (the published LangSmith stack — skip ee/). Pick Helicone if you want that Apache-2.0 observability proxy.
Facts checked 21 Oct 2026. License, language, and GitHub activity come from the catalog or the project's own repo. "Not in the catalog row" means the public catalog dump does not store that number.
Langfuse in the catalog Helicone in the catalog Start on Railway
How they compare
| Langfuse | Helicone | |
|---|---|---|
| License | MIT core (catalog; skip ee/) source | Apache-2.0 (catalog) source |
| Language | TypeScript (catalog) | TypeScript (catalog) |
| GitHub activity | 36,145 stars in the catalog source | 6,231 stars in the catalog source |
| Self-host | Published as /stacks/langfuse-observe. Postgres. Skip ee/. | Same stack as the sibling proxy. Official docs at helicone.ai. |
| Best for | Traces and evals on a box you run. | A proxy in front of the model API. |
Self-hosting and resource needs
Both are on /stacks/langfuse-observe. Langfuse is langfuse/langfuse. Helicone is Helicone/helicone. Phoenix is ELv2 — /compare/langfuse-vs-phoenix. You still pay tokens.
FAQ
- What about Phoenix?
- Useful, and not OSI — /compare/langfuse-vs-phoenix.
- Is this Weights and Biases?
- No. Training runs are /replace/wandb (MLflow).
- Are these free?
- Langfuse core is MIT. Helicone is Apache-2.0. You pay hosting and tokens.
- How do I deploy Helicone?
- Follow helicone.ai self-host docs, or start at /stacks/langfuse-observe.
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