Helicone vs Lunary

Two fact sheets from our own research, side by side — pricing, platforms, API access and status re-checked by us rather than quoted from the vendors.

The short answer

Entry price: Helicone from $79/mo, Lunary from $20/seat/mo — different billing units, so no direct winner
Free plan: Both have one
Public API: Both have one
Best fit: Helicone: Developers who want cost, latency and usage logs for LLM calls with minimal code changes · Lunary: Small teams debugging agent traces and watching token spend
Trust score: About even — Helicone 80, Lunary 83

From our own records as of each tool's last check. Anything we have not confirmed is left out rather than guessed. How we verify

HeliconeOpen-source LLM observability and AI gateway that logs every request, tracks cost and latency, caches and fails over between providers.

LunaryTracing, analytics and prompt versioning for LLM apps, with a self-hostable community edition.

Side by side

Fact	Helicone	Lunary
Category	LLM Observability & Evaluation	LLM Observability & Evaluation
Pricing model	Freemium	Freemium
Starts at	$79/mo	$20/seat/mo
Public API	Yes	Yes
Trust score	80 / 100	83 / 100
Platforms	Web, API	Web, API
Company	Helicone, Inc.	Lunary LLC
Launched	2023	—
Last verified	Oct 29, 2026	Oct 16, 2026

What our research says

Helicone

Helicone is a quick way to get request logs, cost tracking and caching on top of LLM calls with a one-line base-URL change, and the open-source code means you can run it yourself. Its ownership has changed twice in 2026 and the public changelog has been quiet since late 2025, so teams choosing a long-term observability platform should weigh that against more actively developed options.

Pros

Proxy or gateway integration takes one line of configuration
Free tier with 10,000 requests a month and an open-source self-host option
Built-in caching, rate limits and automatic provider fallbacks
Session view for multi-step agent traces and HQL for custom queries

Cons

Free plan keeps data for only 7 days and Pro for one month
Usage-based charges on top of the plan fee make bills harder to predict
Ownership uncertainty: acquired by Mintlify in March 2026, then announced as separated again with no details

Lunary

A mid-weight alternative to the big observability suites: traces, cost analytics and prompt versioning without the platform tax, and a free self-hosted edition if you would rather keep traces in your own network. The cloud Team plan is priced per seat and capped at ten, so it fits a small team and then pushes you into a sales conversation.

Pros

Traces with error stacks and search, aimed at debugging multi-step agents
Cost, usage and user-satisfaction analytics with custom dashboards
Prompt templates with versioning and A/B testing
SDKs for OpenAI, Anthropic, Vertex, Azure and Mistral
Community edition self-hosts at no cost; PII masking, RBAC and SSO available

Cons

Team plan hard-caps at ten seats before Enterprise
50,000 events included, then $10 per further 50,000 on top of seats
Self-hosted Docker and Kubernetes support is the paid enterprise edition, not the free one
Company country is inferred from the entity name; no address is published

Which one fits

Choose Helicone if you need

Developers who want cost, latency and usage logs for LLM calls with minimal code changes
Teams that need a gateway with caching and provider fallback alongside logging
Companies that prefer an Apache-2.0 tool they can self-host

Choose Lunary if you need

Small teams debugging agent traces and watching token spend
Keeping prompt versions and A/B tests outside application code
Self-hosting observability when traces cannot leave your network