Langfuse vs Anthropic API
Open-source LLM engineering platform — observability, prompts, evals
vs. API for Claude — frontier models for chat, tool use, agents, and long-context reasoning
Pricing tiers
Langfuse
Hobby (Cloud Free)
Free. 50k units/month included. 30 days data access. 2 users. Community support.
Free
Self-Hosted (OSS)
MIT-licensed. Docker Compose or Kubernetes deployment. Unlimited.
$0 base (usage-based)
Core
$29/month. 100k units included ($8 per 100k overage). 90 days retention. Unlimited users. In-app support.
$29/mo
Pro
$199/month. 100k units included + same overage. 3 YEARS retention. Unlimited annotation queues. High rate limits.
$199/mo
Teams Add-on
+$300/month. Adds Enterprise SSO + fine-grained RBAC + dedicated Slack support to Pro.
$300/mo
Enterprise
$2,499/month. Everything + custom rate limits, uptime SLA, dedicated support engineer. Yearly options.
$2499/mo
Anthropic API
Opus 4.7 — usage
Input $5 / output $25 / cache-write $6.25 / cache-read $0.50 per 1M tokens. Batch = 50% off.
Custom
Sonnet 4.6 — usage
Input $3 / output $15 / cache-write $3.75 / cache-read $0.30 per 1M tokens. Batch = 50% off.
Custom
Haiku 4.5 — usage
Input $1 / output $5 / cache-write $1.25 / cache-read $0.10 per 1M tokens. Batch = 50% off.
Custom
Free-tier quotas head-to-head
Comparing hobby on Langfuse vs opus-4-7 on Anthropic API.
| Metric | Langfuse | Anthropic API |
|---|---|---|
| discount batch | — | 50 % off |
Features
Langfuse · 16 features
- Annotation Queues — Human reviewers rate traces. Unlimited on Pro+.
- Dashboards — Aggregate metrics, cost, quality across projects.
- Datasets — Curate test sets from production traces. Run experiments.
- EU Cloud Region — GDPR-compliant hosting in EU.
- Evaluations — LLM-as-judge, manual scores, custom model-graded evaluators.
- LLM Cost Tracking — Automatic cost calculation per provider/model.
- OpenTelemetry Native — OTel SDK → Langfuse endpoint works out of box.
- Playground — Test prompts + models + variables live.
- Prompt Management — Version, tag, label prompts. Reference from code by label.
- Public API — Full REST API for ingest, query, prompt management.
- Python @observe decorator — One-line decorator to trace any function.
- Self-Hosting — Docker Compose + k8s Helm chart.
- Sessions — Group related traces (conversations, agent runs).
- Tracing — Capture every LLM call, tool call, nested span with inputs/outputs/cost.
- Users Tracking — Segment traces by user ID, track per-user cost.
- Webhooks — Subscribe to trace completion events.
Anthropic API · 0 features
Developer interfaces
| Kind | Langfuse | Anthropic API |
|---|---|---|
| CLI | — | Claude Code CLI |
| SDK | langfuse-js, langfuse-python | Go SDK, Java SDK, Python SDK, Ruby SDK, TypeScript SDK (@anthropic-ai/sdk) |
| REST | Langfuse REST API | AWS Bedrock, Google Vertex AI, Microsoft Azure AI, REST API (Messages + Agents) |
| MCP | Langfuse MCP Server | — |
| OTHER | Langfuse Dashboard, OpenTelemetry endpoint | — |
Staxly is an independent catalog of developer platforms. Some links to Langfuse and Anthropic API may be affiliate links — Staxly may earn a commission if you sign up through them, at no extra cost to you. Pricing is verified against vendor pages at publication time — reconfirm before buying.
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