Helicone vs Opik (2026)

Model providers connect through the gateway. Helicone also works with frameworks such as the Vercel AI SDK, LiteLLM, OpenRouter and CrewAI, sends webhooks out, and offers a Zapier app that runs chat completions through the gateway. These route model traffic and send events. None of them connects an agent to a real system to take actions.

SourceHelicone, docs.helicone.ai/llms.txt (integrations, webhooks, Zapier, web search)read 2026-09-21

Integrations cover more than 40 AI frameworks, model providers and gateways, including LangChain, OpenAI, Google ADK, LangGraph and CrewAI, and alerts send webhooks out. These bring trace data in and send notifications, and none connects an agent to a business system to take actions. Through Opik Connect, Ollie reads the customer's agent codebase, writes approved fixes to it and reruns the agent from a failing trace. That is the one path that takes action, and it reaches only the local codebase.

SourceComet, comet.com/site/pricing and comet.com/docs/opik/llms.txt (Ollie, integrations)read 2026-09-21

Per request, the gateway routes and falls back between providers, and prompts are assembled from versioned templates at call time. There are no workflows that sequence, branch or retry agent steps, or that combine deterministic nodes with agent steps.

SourceHelicone, docs.helicone.ai/llms.txt (provider routing, prompt assembly)read 2026-09-21

From traces, Opik draws the customer's agent execution graphs, the Agent Playground runs the customer's agent locally while traced, and agent configuration versions prompts, model settings and tool definitions outside the codebase. Opik runs no workflows that sequence, branch or retry steps, or that combine deterministic nodes with agent steps.

SourceComet, comet.com/docs/opik/llms.txt (development overview, agent playground) and comet.com/site/pricingread 2026-09-21

Alerts fire when an application crosses error thresholds or cost limits. Automated weekly reports deliver usage, cost and performance summaries to email or Slack, and webhooks send request events to the customer's endpoints.

SourceHelicone, docs.helicone.ai/llms.txt (alerts, reports, webhooks) and helicone.ai/pricingread 2026-09-21

Online evaluation rules score production traces automatically as they are logged, Diagnostics scans a project's traces with Ollie and surfaces recurring agent issues with a root cause and suggested fix, and alerts send webhook notifications on events such as trace errors, new feedback scores and prompt changes. Evaluation and investigation start on incoming traces without a person asking.

SourceComet, comet.com/docs/opik/llms.txt (online evaluation rules, diagnostics, alerts) and comet.com/site/pricingread 2026-09-21

Model traffic is routed and logged, web search can be added to Anthropic models through the gateway, and datasets hold logged requests for evaluation and fine tuning. There is no document ingestion, index, retrieval layer or knowledge API that grounds an agent in company data.

SourceHelicone, docs.helicone.ai/llms.txt (web search, datasets)read 2026-09-21

RAG metrics in Opik score retrieval quality. Opik also traces the context a customer's retrieval returns and generates synthetic examples from traces for datasets. There is no document ingestion, index, retrieval layer or knowledge API that grounds an agent in company data.

SourceComet, comet.com/docs/opik/llms.txt and comet.com/site/pricingread 2026-09-21

Logged requests, sessions and prompt versions persist, and the gateway can automatically clear old tool uses and thinking blocks from long running agent sessions. Agents get no session, workflow or long term memory to read and write.

SourceHelicone, docs.helicone.ai/llms.txt (sessions, context editing)read 2026-09-21

The customer's traces, sessions and threads are recorded, datasets and prompts are versioned, and an offline fallback replays tracing messages after an outage. There is no session, workflow or long-term memory that an agent reads and writes.

SourceComet, comet.com/docs/opik/llms.txt (tracing concepts, offline fallback) and comet.com/site/pricingread 2026-09-21

With LLM Security enabled, Helicone screens each user message with Meta's Prompt Guard, and optionally Llama Guard across 14 threat categories. It blocks detected threats with an error response before the request is processed. Moderation filters harmful content, and custom rate limits cap requests by count or cost.

SourceHelicone, docs.helicone.ai/features/advanced-usage/llm-security and llms.txt (moderations, custom rate limits); docs.helicone.ai/features/advanced-usage/llm-security.mdread 2026-09-21

Guardrails in Opik run inline with LLM calls on live traffic and can stop or alter a response before it reaches a user, with five guard types (PII, allowed and restricted topics, prompt injection and jailbreak, an LLM-as-a-judge check, and a custom classifier) grouped into named policies that can be enforced workspace-wide, and every run logged as a span. Ollie, Opik's assistant, proposes code edits that a person reviews and approves before anything changes on disk.

SourceComet, comet.com/docs/opik/guardrails/overview and comet.com/site/pricing (Ollie, Opik Connect); comet.com/docs/opik/guardrails/overview.mdread 2026-09-21

SAML SSO comes on the Enterprise plan, with identity integration through the customer's own provider, and each plan sets its organizations and seats. SOC 2 Type II and HIPAA compliance come from the Team plan up, with InfoSec reviews and customized MSAs on Enterprise. Provider keys are encrypted, data sits in EU or US regions, and retention is configurable. Helicone names no roles or permissions inside an organization.

SourceHelicone, helicone.ai/pricing and docs.helicone.ai/references/data-autonomyread 2026-10-01

The Enterprise plan includes enterprise SSO over OAuth 2.0, SAML and LDAP with SSO enforcement, custom role-based access at project and organization level, view-only users, service accounts, and SOC 2, ISO 27001, ISO 9001, HIPAA and GDPR compliance. Opik also supports SAML, OIDC and JWT authentication and workspace roles and permissions, and Comet says Opik produces audit logs for governance teams.

SourceComet, comet.com/site/pricing, comet.com/docs/opik/llms.txt (authentication, roles and permissions) and comet.com/site/products/opikread 2026-09-21

Every request through the gateway or SDK is logged with prompt, completion, tokens, cost, latency and errors. Helicone groups them into sessions for agents and pipelines, adds user analytics and custom properties, and lets teams query analytics directly with HQL, a SQL interface with row level security. Data export is available. Retention runs 7 days on Hobby, 1 month on Pro, 3 months on Team and indefinitely on Enterprise, where it is also configurable.

SourceHelicone, docs.helicone.ai/llms.txt (sessions, HQL, data export) and helicone.ai/pricingread 2026-09-21

Every step of an application's execution is traced, from context retrieval to model responses and tool calls, with agent execution graphs, sessions for multi-turn conversations, token and cost tracking and error surfacing. Traces, spans, threads, datasets and experiments export through the SDKs, REST API, UI and command line. Span retention is 60 days on Free and Pro and custom on Enterprise, and Comet says Opik produces audit logs for governance teams.

SourceComet, comet.com/site/pricing, comet.com/docs/opik/llms.txt (observability, export data) and comet.com/site/products/opikread 2026-09-21

Customers choose an EU or US region for data residency on Helicone Cloud. The open source platform self hosts with Docker or Kubernetes and Helm, and the Enterprise plan includes on premises deployment.

SourceHelicone, docs.helicone.ai/references/data-autonomy and llms.txt (self-hosting, Docker, Kubernetes), and helicone.ai/pricing; docs.helicone.ai/references/data-autonomy.mdread 2026-09-21

The open source build can be downloaded, installed and run on the customer's own infrastructure from the same codebase as the hosted versions. Opik Cloud stores data in the US on the Free and Pro plans, and Enterprise offers flexible deployments across cloud, on-premises and fully managed options with a custom data region.

SourceComet, comet.com/site/pricingread 2026-09-21

A model registry and pricing data cover the models the gateway reaches, and cookbooks explain how to build agents. There are no ready made agents, templates or packaged workflows a customer adopts.

SourceHelicone, docs.helicone.ai/llms.txt (model registry, cookbooks)read 2026-09-21

Opik ships Ollie, a ready-made assistant that reads traces, searches the workspace, builds test suites, proposes fixes and, through Opik Connect, edits and reruns the customer's agent. The same assistant powers Diagnostics, which scans traces for recurring issues. It is one packaged agent with preset uses, not a set of ready-made agents or templates a customer selects among.

SourceComet, comet.com/docs/opik/llms.txt (Ollie, diagnostics) and comet.com/site/pricingread 2026-09-21

The Helicone AI Gateway gives one OpenAI compatible API across more than 100 providers, with automatic provider routing, fallbacks, caching and custom rate limits by request count or cost. Provider keys are stored encrypted in a vault, so customers bring their own keys or use gateway credits.

SourceHelicone, docs.helicone.ai/llms.txt (AI Gateway overview, provider routing, error handling and fallback, custom rate limits) and docs.helicone.ai/references/data-autonomyread 2026-09-21

Through its Gateway, Opik gives a consistent API across multiple LLM providers, workspace AI Providers settings configure connections to providers, built-in LLM-as-a-judge metrics can run on a custom model, the Agent Optimizer works with OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Azure and Ollama, and agent configuration keeps model settings outside the codebase, versioned and changeable without redeploying. Model choice stays with the customer, using its own providers.

SourceComet, comet.com/docs/opik/llms.txt (Gateway, AI Providers, custom model, configuring LLM providers) and comet.com/site/pricing (agent configuration)read 2026-09-21

A REST API covers requests, sessions, scores, evaluations, prompts, webhooks and trace logging. Alongside it sit an OpenAI compatible gateway API, SDK integrations, webhooks, a Zapier app, and a Helicone MCP server that lets MCP compatible assistants query observability data. The codebase is open source.

SourceHelicone, docs.helicone.ai/llms.txt (REST reference, MCP server, webhooks, Zapier)read 2026-09-21

There is a REST API with an OpenAPI specification and a complete Python client that work against both the open source platform and Opik Cloud, along with Python and TypeScript SDKs, native OpenTelemetry ingestion for other languages, the opik command line, and an MCP server that lets an AI coding assistant instrument code, query traces and manage prompts.

SourceComet, comet.com/docs/opik/llms.txt and comet.com/site/pricingread 2026-09-21

Scores and user feedback on requests and sessions come in through the API. Helicone curates request data into datasets for fine tuning and evaluation, provides a playground and versioned prompts deployed through the gateway, and tracks score distributions over time. Customers cannot run an application against fixtures or datasets before production, and there are no configurable quality gates.

SourceHelicone, docs.helicone.ai/llms.txt (eval scores, datasets, prompts, evaluations API) and helicone.ai/pricingread 2026-09-21

Test suites run pass or fail assertions at item and suite level with execution policies for how many runs must pass, experiments test an application over datasets with more than 30 built-in and custom LLM-as-a-judge, heuristic and code metrics for single steps, whole agents and full conversations, annotation queues gather expert review, online evaluation scores production traces, and the Agent Optimizer tunes prompts, tools and parameters with several algorithms.

SourceComet, comet.com/site/pricing and comet.com/docs/opik/llms.txt (test suites, online evaluation, Agent Optimizer)read 2026-09-21

The product covers observability, the AI Gateway, prompts, datasets, security features and self hosting. No agent controls a browser, desktop or computer.

SourceHelicone, docs.helicone.ai/llms.txtread 2026-09-21

Opik covers tracing, evaluation, optimization, guardrails and administration, and there is no browser, desktop or computer control by an agent. The Agent Playground runs the customer's own agent locally with tracing.

SourceComet, comet.com/site/pricing and comet.com/docs/opik/llms.txtread 2026-09-21