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Traceloop vs Helicone: LLM Observability at Agent Scale

Both tools track LLM calls and aggregate costs. The architecture, self-hosting story, and enforcement capabilities differ significantly. Here is how they compare for teams running agents.

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noburn.dev·2026-06-17

Where noburn fits

The tools compared in this article handle observability, routing, or evaluation — all of which operate after the LLM call completes. noburn operates before it. It wraps your existing OpenAI, Anthropic, LangChain, and the Vercel AI SDK client, estimates the token cost of each call, and blocks it if the calling user or project has exceeded their budget. Nothing in this comparison does that at a self-serve price point.

Per-user metering lets you enforce separate limits per end-customer, and Stripe passthrough lets you bill them for their LLM usage without writing a billing layer yourself. The free tier covers 100 requests per month. Documentation and SDKs are at noburn.dev/docs.