These two were built for different jobs: Helicone logs model requests through a gateway and has been in maintenance mode since March 2026, with new cloud sign-ups disabled; Confident AI is an evaluation platform that is still shipping features every week. New teams cannot start on Helicone Cloud, so this page is mostly about what an existing Helicone user gains and loses by moving.[1][6]
Confident AI is an actively developed evaluation platform built on DeepEval; Helicone is an open-source LLM request logger and gateway that has been in maintenance mode since March 2026, with new cloud sign-ups disabled. On 19 October 2026 Helicone said it is no longer part of Mintlify, with no new owner named. For a new deployment, Confident AI is usually the practical choice; existing Helicone users should plan what replaces the gateway before they move.
| Decision factor | Confident AI | Helicone |
|---|---|---|
| Status | Independent and actively developed; weekly changelog | Maintenance mode since March 2026; no longer part of Mintlify as of 19 October 2026, no new owner named |
| New cloud accounts | Open, Free plan available | Sign-ups disabled since March 2026 |
| Evaluation | 40+ DeepEval metrics, online evals, code metrics, annotation queues | Not an evaluation framework by its own docs; code evaluators turned off in October 2026 |
| Gateway | None; traces through LiteLLM, Portkey, OpenRouter and others | Yes: OpenAI-compatible gateway for 100+ providers, with caching and failover |
| Agent tracing | Span model with agent, tool, LLM and retriever spans | Header-based session grouping; no span model for agent steps |
| Licence | DeepEval and confident-trace Apache-2.0; platform proprietary | Apache-2.0 platform; Rust gateway GPL-3.0, not updated since November 2025 |
| Self-hosting | Enterprise only | Free, via Docker or Helm |
| Capability | Confident AI | Helicone | Prefactor |
|---|---|---|---|
| Observe | |||
| LLM call tracing | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Multi-step agent tracing (tool calls, nested spans) | ✓ | Partial | ✓ |
| Cost tracking | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| OpenTelemetry support | ✓ | Partial | ✓ |
| Evaluate | |||
| Offline evals (datasets, experiments) | ✓ | Partial | ✓ |
| Online evals on production traffic | ✓ | Partial | ✓ |
| LLM-as-a-judge scoring | ✓ | Partial | ✓ |
| Code-based evaluators | ✓ | — | ✓ |
| Human review and annotation | ✓ | Partial | ✓ |
| Prompt versioning and playground | ✓ | ✓ | — |
| Act on findings | |||
| Runtime controls on live agent actions | — | Partial | ✓ |
| Gateway or proxy in the request path | — | ✓ | — |
| Licence and deployment | |||
| Open source | Partial | ✓ | Partial |
| Self-hosting | Partial | ✓ | Partial |
Mintlify announced its acquisition of Helicone on 3 March 2026 and moved the product to a maintenance-only phase: patches, bug fixes and new model support, with help to migrate customers to other platforms. Cloud sign-ups have shown as disabled since the same day, and the changelog has no feature entries after November 2025. On 19 October 2026 Helicone's site began saying it is no longer part of Mintlify, with details to come and no new owner named.
For a new deployment that settles most of the question: you cannot open a new Helicone Cloud account, and the product is not adding features. Confident AI, by contrast, shipped tool failure analytics, span trees for subagents, a prompt-based evaluator and voice simulation in October 2026 alone. The rest of this page is written for teams already on Helicone.
Helicone's strengths are request logging and its gateway: one OpenAI-compatible endpoint for more than 100 providers, with failover, caching, rate limits and cost tracking for over 300 models. Confident AI has no gateway of its own. If your application calls models through Helicone's gateway, you need a replacement such as LiteLLM, Portkey, OpenRouter, Bifrost or TrueFoundry, all of which Confident AI can trace.
What you gain is evaluation. Helicone's documentation says it is not an evaluation framework, its Python evaluators were turned off in October 2026, and its agent tracing groups requests by session headers rather than modelling agent steps. Confident AI records agent, tool, LLM and retriever spans, runs online evals on traces, spans and threads, and adds DeepEval's metric library, annotation queues, red teaming and simulation.
Check cost reporting before you switch. Helicone calculates per-request and per-session cost, prices more than 300 models and sends cost alerts. Confident AI records token usage and cost on model spans, but infers prices automatically only for OpenAI, Anthropic and Gemini; for other providers you set rates in code or through project-level cost rules.
Operational history is also worth weighing. In May 2026 AWS locked Helicone's account for about four days: the proxy stayed up, but dashboards and log processing were down until queued logs were processed afterwards. With the product in maintenance mode and its ownership unclear, plan for how a similar incident would be handled.
Start by separating the two jobs Helicone does for you. Move model routing to a gateway you will keep, then point tracing at Confident AI. Helicone's async logging is built on OpenLLMetry instrumentation, and Confident AI's OTLP endpoint reads OpenLLMetry attributes, so part of your instrumentation may carry over; test it on a staging project first, since Confident AI accepts OTLP over HTTP only. Confident AI also lists direct integrations for OpenAI, Anthropic, LangChain, LangGraph, LlamaIndex, CrewAI and Vercel AI SDK.
Prompts stored in Helicone's prompt versioning need moving to Confident AI's Prompt Studio, which supports commits, versions and environment labels. If self-hosting Helicone for free was the reason you chose it, note that Confident AI's self-hosting is Enterprise-only; self-hosted Helicone keeps running, but receives only maintenance updates.
Do the move in stages. Run Confident AI alongside Helicone for a period, compare the traces and costs each records, and switch off Helicone logging only when the new dashboards and evals cover what your team checks each week.
As of 20 October 2026, Helicone lists Hobby free with 10K requests, Pro at $79 a month and Team at $799 a month, but new cloud sign-ups are disabled, so no new customer can start on any plan. Confident AI's Free plan covers 2 seats and 1 GB-month of trace data, Starter is $200 a month per organisation with unlimited seats, and Team is $2,000 a month. Check Confident AI's pricing and Helicone's pricing.
We sell the layer this section describes. Read it with that in mind.
Stated plainly, since Prefactor publishes this page: Prefactor is an agent evaluation platform that scores each step of a run and acts on what it finds through runtime policies on tool calls and data access, approval holds for risky actions, and a kill switch for a run, an agent or a team. Helicone's gateway can block prompt injection for OpenAI models only and apply rate limits; Confident AI checks recorded data after the fact; neither holds agent actions for approval. Prefactor has no gateway, no prompt playground or prompt registry, and its platform is hosted, so it does not replace Helicone's routing. See the full comparison of 15 platforms.
Reviewed against public product and documentation pages on October 20, 2026. If a vendor has changed a feature, product name, or positioning since then, send a correction and we will update it. Numbered source links in the page body point to the ordered sources below.
Prefactor scores each step of every agent run and can hold or stop an action when a score says it should not happen. Start on the free tier: 5,000 spans a month, no credit card required.
Prefactor helps teams observe, evaluate, and improve their AI agents in production, across every framework and provider.