Staxly

Helicone vs Neon

Open-source LLM observability — 1-line integration via proxy
vs. Serverless Postgres with branching and bottomless storage

Helicone website ↗Neon website ↗

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
Helicone website ↗

Neon

Free
100 projects, 0.5 GB storage + 100 CU-hours each. Great for prototypes and preview envs.
Free
Launch
Usage-based, no minimum. Small production workloads. $0.35/GB-month storage, $0.106/CU-hour.
$0 base (usage-based)
Scale
Usage-based, higher compute tier + faster instances ($0.222/CU-hour). Up to 30-day PITR, 1,000 projects.
$0 base (usage-based)
Business
Usage-based with 99.95% SLA, HIPAA available. Private networking $0.01/GB.
$0 base (usage-based)
Neon website ↗

Free-tier quotas head-to-head

Comparing hobby on Helicone vs free on Neon.

MetricHeliconeNeon
branches per project—10 branches
cu hours per project—100 CU-hours/month
egress gb month—5 GB/month
pitr retention hours—6 hours
projects—100 projects
storage gb per project—0.5 GB
team members—3 users

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.

Neon · 14 features

  • Autoscaling — Compute scales CPU + memory between min and max CU in seconds based on load.
  • Branching — Git-like DB branches: copy-on-write snapshots of data + schema. Instant, cheap. …
  • Data API (REST) — PostgREST-compatible REST endpoint auto-generated from your schema. Uses Postgre…
  • IP Allowlist — Restrict DB access to specific CIDRs. Launch+.
  • Launchpad — One-click create-a-database link that can be embedded in OSS repos (DATABASE_URL…
  • Logical Replication — Publish changes to Snowflake, BigQuery, Kafka, or other Postgres. Subscribe from…
  • Monitoring — Built-in dashboards for CPU/RAM/connections/slow queries. Prometheus export on B…
  • Neon Auth — Stack Auth integrated: users table auto-synced into your Postgres (public.users_…
  • Point-in-Time Restore — Restore DB to any moment in the retention window (6h free → 30d Scale) via branc…
  • Private Networking — AWS PrivateLink / VPC peering. Business plan.
  • Read Replicas — Create a read-only compute endpoint on the same branch. Zero replication lag (re…
  • Scale to Zero — Compute suspends when idle — no charge for compute while paused. Cold-start ~300…
  • Schema Diff — Compare schema between branches — build PR checks and preview migrations safely.
  • SQL over HTTP — Serverless driver lets you query Postgres over HTTPS — works in edge runtimes (V…

Developer interfaces

KindHeliconeNeon
CLIHelicone CLINeon CLI
SDKhelicone (npm), helicone-python@neondatabase/serverless
RESTAsync Logging API, Helicone Proxy, Query API (HQL)Management / Control Plane API, Neon Data API (REST), SQL over HTTP
MCP—Neon MCP Server
OTHERHelicone Dashboard, WebhooksPostgres Wire Protocol
Staxly is an independent catalog of developer platforms. Outbound links to Helicone and Neon are plain references to their official websites. Pricing is verified against vendor pages at publication time — reconfirm before buying.

Want this comparison in your AI agent's context? Install the free Staxly MCP server.