Why people look for a Helicone alternative
Until this year, the honest answer was "they mostly don't." Helicone was a good product with the lowest-friction integration in LLM observability: change a base URL, get logging, cost tracking, and caching. The reason this page exists is a change in circumstances, not a flaw in the product.
- Maintenance mode. Helicone was acquired by Mintlify in March 2026. Existing deployments keep working, but feature development has stopped, issue response has slowed, and the long-term security-update horizon is unclear.
- Observability is infrastructure. You wire it into every service and build dashboards, alerts, and cost reports on top. Building deeper on a frozen foundation makes the eventual migration more expensive every month.
- The model landscape keeps moving. New providers, new endpoints, and new API shapes (streaming changes, responses APIs, agent tool calls) need gateway support. A tool that no longer ships falls behind the traffic you send through it.
- Compliance pressure is rising. EU AI Act transparency obligations took effect in August 2026. Teams that log full prompt/completion pairs now need redaction and audit answers a maintenance-mode tool won't add.
Summary: Grepture as the Helicone alternative
Grepture is the closest architectural match among active tools: a proxy on the request path, integrated by changing a base URL, with cost tracking and user-level attribution built in. On top of the Helicone-style core it adds the things you'd otherwise assemble separately: PII redaction and secret scanning before requests leave your infrastructure, hard budget caps with Slack alerts, prompt management, evals on production traffic, and an EU-hosted deployment.
At a glance
| Grepture | Helicone | |
|---|---|---|
| Status | Actively developed | Maintenance mode (acquired March 2026) |
| Architecture | Proxy + zero-latency trace mode | Proxy + async logging |
| Integration | Base-URL change | Base-URL change |
| Cost tracking | Per team, user, feature, model; budgets + hard caps | Per user/property |
| Budget alerts | Slack + hard spend caps | Basic |
| PII redaction | Native, reversible (mask-and-restore) | No |
| Secret scanning | 30+ credential types | No |
| Caching | No | Yes |
| Prompt management | Versioning, diff, experiments | Basic |
| Evals | On production traffic | Limited |
| Routing / fallback | Multi-provider | Partial |
| Hosting | EU (Frankfurt) managed, or self-host proxy core | US cloud, or self-host |
| Open source | Proxy core | Yes |
Migrating from Helicone
Because both tools are proxies, the migration is the same motion as the original adoption:
- Swap the base URL. Point your SDK at the Grepture endpoint instead of Helicone's. That's the whole integration for basic logging and cost tracking.
- Map custom properties. Helicone's
Helicone-Property-*headers for user and feature attribution map to Grepture's request metadata and labels, which drive per-team and per-user cost reports. - Recreate alerts as budgets. Grepture budgets support soft alerts (Slack) and hard caps that stop traffic at a spend threshold, per key or per team.
- Decide on proxy vs. trace mode per service. Latency-sensitive paths can use trace mode (async SDK logging, requests go direct to the provider). Paths that need redaction, routing, or fallback go through the proxy.
- Turn on scanning when ready. PII redaction and secret scanning are policy switches, not integrations. The traffic log shows what would be redacted before you enforce.
Historical Helicone data doesn't import automatically; most teams run both in parallel for a week and let the old data age out.
Where Grepture is the better fit
- You want the Helicone integration model (proxy, base-URL change, per-user cost tracking) from a vendor that is actively shipping.
- Your prompts contain customer data, and logging them raw into a US-hosted tool has become a compliance problem rather than a convenience.
- You want spend governance, not just spend visibility: hard caps, budget alerts, per-team attribution.
- You're consolidating: gateway, observability, prompt management, and evals as one integration instead of three tools.
- You're EU-based or sell to EU customers and need data residency plus an audit trail.
Where another tool is the better fit
- Response caching is central to your cost strategy. Helicone's caching has no Grepture equivalent; if that's the main value you get, evaluate whether budgets and routing cover the same spend goals before migrating.
- You want pure open-source self-hosted tracing with no vendor at all. Langfuse is the strongest option, SDK-based rather than proxy-based. See our Grepture vs. Langfuse comparison.
- Your primary need is experiment-heavy eval iteration. Braintrust's eval workflow is deeper than Grepture's production-focused evals.
For the full landscape, we keep an updated comparison of LLM observability tools that covers the post-consolidation field.