Helicone vs Amplitude
Open-source LLM observability — 1-line integration via proxy
vs. Digital analytics + experimentation + CDP
Pricing tiers
Helicone
Hobby (Free)
10,000 requests/month. 7-day retention. 1 seat. Basic monitoring.
Free
Startup Discount
<2 years, <$5M funding: 50% off first year.
$0 base (usage-based)
Self-Hosted (OSS)
MIT-licensed. Run Helicone yourself for free.
$0 base (usage-based)
Pro
$79/month. 10k free + usage-based. Unlimited seats. Alerts, reports, HQL query language. 1-month retention.
$79/mo
Team
$799/month. 5 orgs, SOC-2 + HIPAA compliance, dedicated Slack, 3-month retention.
$799/mo
Enterprise
Custom MSA, SAML SSO, on-prem deploy, bulk discounts, forever retention.
Custom
Amplitude
Starter (Free)
10K Monthly Tracked Users, 10M events/mo. Session Replay + unlimited feature flags + Web Experimentation + AI Feedback included.
Free
Plus
$49/mo (annual). Up to 300K MTUs + 25M events. Unlimited product analytics, behavioral cohorts, feature tagging, custom audiences.
$49/mo
Growth
Custom. Causal insights, Feature Experimentation, real-time streaming, predictive audiences.
Custom
Enterprise
Custom. Cross-product analysis, advanced data controls, mutual exclusion groups, multi-armed bandit.
Custom
Free-tier quotas head-to-head
Comparing hobby on Helicone vs starter on Amplitude.
| Metric | Helicone | Amplitude |
|---|---|---|
| No overlapping quota metrics for these tiers. | ||
Features
Helicone · 16 features
- Alerts — Thresholds on error rate, latency, cost, usage. Pro+.
- Async Logging — Log AFTER the LLM call via SDK — zero added latency.
- Cost Tracking — Automatic cost calculation per call by provider/model.
- Dashboard — Request tables, aggregate metrics, cost breakdowns.
- Evaluators — LLM-as-judge + custom evaluators on runs.
- Experiments — A/B test different models/prompts.
- HQL (SQL over traces) — Query your logged data with SQL. Pro+.
- PII Redaction — Automatically scrub emails, credit cards, etc. from logs.
- Prompt Caching — Cache identical requests → save money.
- Prompts & Versions — Store + version + A/B test prompts.
- Proxy Mode — 1-line integration via base URL swap. Captures all requests.
- Rate Limiting — Per-user + per-key rate limit policies.
- Reports — Scheduled email reports with KPIs.
- Self-Hosting — Docker + k8s deployment.
- Sessions — Group related calls (chat sessions, agent runs).
- User Metrics — Per-user cost + usage segmentation.
Amplitude · 13 features
- AI Feedback (Asking) — Natural language questions over your Amplitude data.
- Amplitude CDP — Customer Data Platform — identify, segment, sync to 150+ destinations.
- Causal Insights — AI identifies why a metric changed — root cause.
- Cross-Product Analysis — Analyze across multiple apps/products in the same org.
- Data Governance — Taxonomies, schemas, approvals, category management.
- Data Warehouse Sync — Sync data to/from Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, Databricks.
- Feature Experimentation — Server-side / SDK-level experiments. Growth+.
- Feature Flags — Targeting rules + rollouts. Unlimited in Starter.
- North Star Metric — Pre-built dashboards for key metric tracking.
- Predictive Audiences — ML-based forecasting of user behavior.
- Product Analytics — Core events + funnels + retention + segmentation.
- Session Replay — Pixel-perfect user session recording + privacy masking.
- Web Experimentation — A/B test visual changes on your site without deploy.
Developer interfaces
| Kind | Helicone | Amplitude |
|---|---|---|
| CLI | Helicone CLI | — |
| SDK | helicone (npm), helicone-python | amplitude-analytics-python, @amplitude/analytics-react-native, amplitude-android, amplitude-js / browser-sdk, amplitude-node, AmplitudeSwift (iOS) |
| REST | Async Logging API, Helicone Proxy, Query API (HQL) | Amplitude HTTP API v2, Batch Event API, Export API |
| OTHER | Helicone Dashboard, Webhooks | Data Destinations (webhooks) |
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