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LLM observability and gateway
Helicone is observability first: every call logged with properties, costs and sessions, plus a gateway with caching, rate limits and fallbacks. OpenSmartRoute is the decision the gateway forwards: which target across kinds, under your policy, with a trace that names the alternatives and the rejections - and a ledger finance can recompute.
“Helicone shows what happened; OpenSmartRoute decides what happens next.”
Our reading of public documentation; corrections welcome through the support page.
| Capability | OpenSmartRoute | Helicone |
|---|---|---|
| Routes to LLMs | Yes | Yes |
| Routes to agents, skills, tools, workflows and humans | Yes | No |
| Hard policy before scoring (region, data boundary, PII, tenant, cost) | Yes | No |
| Per-request trace with ranked candidates and rejections | Yes | No |
| Learns from your outcomes (per target, per tenant) | Yes | No |
| Multi-step plans (persona -> skill -> model) | Yes | No |
| Self-hosted, air-gapped, zero runtime dependenciesOpen source, self-hosted with its own database and analytics store | Yes | Partial |
| Prompt-injection and steering-gadget defences on the router | Yes | No |
| Output guard on responses (PII, secrets, injection: flag, redact or block) | Yes | No |
| Savings ledger, bill analysis and routing auditCost per request as logged; no baseline comparison or bill import | Yes | Partial |
| OpenAI-compatible proxy (chat, embeddings, Responses, moderations, audio, images)Chat and embeddings through the gateway; other routes pass through to the provider | Yes | Partial |
| Anthropic Messages API (/v1/messages) | Yes | Yes |
| Virtual keys: per-key budgets, rate limits, allowed targets, scopes and expiryRate limits and cost alerts per property; no target allow-list or scopes per key | Yes | Partial |
| Per-target rate limits, budgets and circuit breakersFallbacks and load balancing per gateway config; no budget or breaker per target | Yes | Partial |
| Python and TypeScript SDKs | Yes | Yes |
| MCP server for IDEs and agents | Yes | No |
| Browser extension and desktop app for the people on the teamPrice, personal-data and writing checks on the device before a prompt is sent, on ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and in any desktop app | Yes | No |
| Provider marketplace with creditsModels by the token: every catalogue model on offer per provider with the price you pay, one key, a prepaid credits wallet and provider preferences (order, only, ignore, max_price) | Yes | No |
| Request/response observability UI for every callDecision trace, tokens, cost and outcome per request; prompt and answer stored when the workspace turns on request logging (redacted or full) | Yes | Yes |
Point the OpenSmartRoute proxy at your Helicone gateway URL as a provider base, or send Helicone's cost per call back as feedback: the console keeps the logs, the router keeps the decision.
H = {"Authorization": f"Bearer {OSR_API_KEY}"}
decision = requests.post(f"{OSR}/api/v1/route", json={"text": prompt}, headers=H).json()
# execute through Helicone, then close the loop with what it cost
requests.post(f"{OSR}/api/v1/feedback", headers=H,
json={"request_id": decision["request_id"], "target_id": decision["target"]["id"],
"success": True, "cost_usd": helicone_cost})Run the Routing Audit on a week of anonymised logs: savings versus your current mix, policy violations your routing allowed, and where agents or humans would have been the better answer.
Other comparisons: OpenRouter, LiteLLM, Portkey, Cloudflare AI Gateway, Kong AI Gateway, Not Diamond, Martian, Unify, Building it yourself.