Helicone vs OpenAI API

Helicone

OpenAI API

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.

OpenAI API · 12 features

• Assistants API — Stateful assistants with tools, threads, file search.
• Batch API — 50% discount for async processing within 24h.
• Chat Completions API — Classic /v1/chat/completions endpoint.
• Files API — Upload docs for retrieval, fine-tuning, batch.
• Fine-Tuning — Supervised + DPO fine-tuning for GPT-4o, GPT-4.1, GPT-4o-mini.
• Function Calling — JSON-schema tool calling; parallel calls supported.
• Moderation — Safety classifier API (free).
• Prompt Caching — Auto-cache repeated prefixes; 50% cheaper cached hits.
• Realtime API — WebSocket streaming voice + text with low latency.
• Responses API — Stateful conversational API.
• Structured Outputs — Enforced JSON schema compliance.
• Vision — Image input for GPT models.