Langfuse vs PocketBase
Open-source LLM engineering platform — observability, prompts, evals
vs. Open-source backend in a single Go binary
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
PocketBase
Self-Hosted
MIT-licensed single binary. Run on any VPS / Docker / bare metal. No usage caps — only limited by your server.
$0 base (usage-based)
Free-tier quotas head-to-head
Comparing hobby on Langfuse vs self-hosted on PocketBase.
| Metric | Langfuse | PocketBase |
|---|---|---|
| No overlapping quota metrics for these tiers. | ||
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.
PocketBase · 12 features
- Access Rules — Record-level access rules (filter expressions) referencing @request and @collect…
- Admin Dashboard — Built-in web UI for schema + data management.
- Auth — Email+password, OAuth2 (Google, GitHub, Facebook, Apple, Discord, Microsoft, etc…
- Backups — Built-in backup/restore with S3 upload option.
- Built-in Mailer — SMTP integration for verification, password reset, magic link emails.
- Collections — Schema-defined record types with fields, validations, and record/admin/auth acce…
- Embedded JS Engine — JavaScript VM (goja) lets you write hooks in JS without recompiling.
- Extend as Go Library — Embed PocketBase in a larger Go app, add custom routes and events.
- File Storage — Local filesystem or S3-compatible storage with access rules.
- Hooks — Server-side Go or JavaScript hooks that run on CRUD events (OnRecordBeforeCreate…
- Migrations — JS/Go migration scripts applied on startup.
- Realtime Subscriptions — SSE-based subscriptions to collection changes.
Developer interfaces
| Kind | Langfuse | PocketBase |
|---|---|---|
| SDK | langfuse-js, langfuse-python | Go API (extend as library), pocketbase (Dart), pocketbase (JS SDK) |
| REST | Langfuse REST API | REST API |
| MCP | Langfuse MCP Server | — |
| OTHER | Langfuse Dashboard, OpenTelemetry endpoint | Admin Dashboard, Realtime SSE |
Staxly is an independent catalog of developer platforms. Outbound links to Langfuse and PocketBase are plain references to their official websites. Pricing is verified against vendor pages at publication time — reconfirm before buying.
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