Routeplane vs Helicone
Helicone made LLM observability effortless. Routeplane is governance-first, with routing, guardrails, and sovereignty on the hot path, and observability included.
Helicone earned its adoption: the lowest-friction onboarding in the category (add a header, get visibility), best-in-class session tracing and cost analytics on a ClickHouse backend, and first-class framework integrations. Its standalone Rust AI Gateway posted credible benchmarks. If pure observability depth is your requirement, Helicone set the bar.
Two things changed the calculus. First, Helicone was acquired by Mintlify in March 2026 and, per its own announcement, is now in maintenance mode, security updates and fixes continue, new feature development does not. Second, observability was always the product’s center of gravity: there is no PII masking, no prompt-injection detection, no MCP governance, and no per-request residency, and the full self-hosted analytics stack requires running six-plus services. Routeplane comes from the opposite direction: governance and routing first, in one Rust container, with usage analytics, logs, and FinOps included rather than being the whole product.
Feature-by-feature
| Capability | routeplane | Helicone |
|---|---|---|
| OpenAI-compatible API | ✓ | ✓ |
| Active feature development | ✓ | ◐ maintenance mode (Mar 2026) |
| Session-level observability depth | ◐ usage, logs, FinOps | ✓ best-in-class (cloud) |
| Per-request regulated-data classification | ✓ | ✗ |
| Region-locked routing enforced per request | ✓ | ✗ |
| PII / secret redaction in the data plane | ✓ | ✗ |
| Prompt-injection detection | ✓ | ✗ |
| MCP / agent tool-call governance | ✓ | ✗ |
| Self-host completeness | ✓ single container | ◐ 6+ services for full stack |
| Engine language / tail latency | ✓ Rust, no-GC | ◐ TS Workers prod path; Rust GW beta |
| Multi-currency FinOps & chargeback | ✓ | ✗ |
Which should you choose?
Choose routeplane when
- You need a gateway with an active roadmap, not a product in maintenance mode.
- Governance is the job: PII redaction, injection checks, residency, and agent tool-call control on the hot path.
- You want observability included, usage, logs, cost attribution, without running a six-service analytics stack.
- Finance needs chargeback in the currency they report in.
Choose Helicone when
- Deep session tracing and prompt analytics are the requirement, and hosted maintenance-mode software is acceptable.
- You want the lowest-possible-friction observability add-on to an existing OpenAI integration today.
- Your framework integrations (LangChain, LlamaIndex, CrewAI) are the deciding factor.
Migrating to routeplane
If your apps reach providers through Helicone’s proxy, switching is a base-URL change to https://api.routeplane.ai/v1. Usage, cost, and log data are available from Routeplane’s built-in analytics and logs APIs, and official Python and TypeScript SDKs, a CLI, and an MCP server are available for tighter integration.
Frequently asked questions
What happened to Helicone?
Helicone was acquired by Mintlify on March 3, 2026. Per Helicone’s own announcement, the service continues in maintenance mode, security updates, new model support, and bug fixes ship, but new feature development has stopped. Factor that into any new production adoption.
Do I lose observability by choosing Routeplane?
You lose Helicone’s session-tracing depth, that’s a real concession; it was their moat. You keep what most teams need operationally: per-request usage and cost attribution, logs, and FinOps rollups, built into the gateway rather than a separate cloud.
Is Routeplane’s gateway comparable to Helicone’s Rust AI Gateway?
Both are Rust data planes with a no-GC hot path (Routeplane targets single-digit-millisecond added overhead by design). The difference is scope: Helicone’s gateway is a thin router feeding its observability cloud; Routeplane’s carries guardrails, residency, and MCP governance in the same binary.
See the residency header come back true.
Point your existing OpenAI-compatible client at routeplane and route your first sovereign request this week.