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Uncoil vs Helicone
Helicone is an open-source LLM observability platform and AI gateway, often set up by routing traffic through its proxy. Uncoil watches whole agent runs from instrumentation, with no proxy in your request path.
Short answer
Which one should you pick?
Pick Helicone if
- You want a gateway in front of providers for routing and fallbacks
- You want the simplest drop-in request logging
- You want an open-source tool you can self-host
Pick Uncoil if
- Your product is an agent, so you need the whole run with its tool calls, not only single requests
- You want evaluation and alerts alongside traces
- You prefer SDK or OpenTelemetry instrumentation to a proxy in the request path
About Helicone: Apache-2.0 licensed, self-hostable LLM observability with request logging and analytics, plus AI gateway routing and fallbacks.
Head to head
Helicone
Uncoil
- HeliconeProxy or gateway in front of providers, or SDK
- 01Setup style
- UncoilSDK or OpenTelemetry; no proxy in your request path
- HeliconeLLM requests and sessions
- 02Unit of observation
- UncoilWhole agent runs with nested model and tool calls
- HeliconeYes (Apache 2.0, self-hostable)
- 03Open source
- UncoilNo; SDKs and docs are public
- HeliconePer-request cost analytics
- 04Cost tracking
- UncoilCost, tokens and latency per run, with alerts
- HeliconeDatasets and scoring
- 05Evaluation
- UncoilEvaluation datasets, scores and release gates in the same product
Descriptions of other products are summaries and can change. Check Helicone's own site for current features and pricing.
Questions
Common questions.
- Does Uncoil sit in the request path?
- No. Uncoil receives traces after the work is done, so it cannot add latency or a failure point to your model calls.