AI Gateway HQ vs. Helicone
Block policy and budget violations ahead of model use, and keep prompt text out of the ledger by default.
- Pre-dispatch control
- Operator-ready evidence
- Prompt storage off by default
Choose AI Gateway HQ when the primary question is ‘should this request be allowed, funded, and routed?’ rather than only ‘what happened afterward?’ Helicone is a strong experimentation and observability product; AI Gateway HQ owns the preventive enterprise decision boundary.
The runtime evaluates identity, signed workload context, risk signals, policy, budget, rate, concurrency, route capability, and provider health before decrypting the selected credential or dispatching upstream.
Compare what each gateway does.
Our column describes the working product. The Helicone column summarizes its linked documentation and pricing; it does not rely on anonymous review scores.
A compatible endpoint, encrypted BYOK pools, health-aware routing, shared cooldowns, and reason-coded fallback.
OpenAI-compatible gateway across 100+ providers with managed credits, fallback, caching, and integrated observability.
Budget and capacity are reserved before forwarding. Settlement uses supported provider-reported usage, and promotional credit cannot fund server-paid models.
Rate limits and cost tracking alongside sessions, prompts, experiments, and request analytics.
OIDC, required MFA, least-privilege roles, workload keys, signed context, staged enforcement, and local attack screening.
Team controls and Enterprise SAML; the platform is especially deep in developer-facing LLM observability.
AWS serverless deployment behind WAF, tenant-bound encryption, signed releases, metadata-only request records by default, tamper-evident exports, and approved support access.
Managed service with Enterprise self-hosting options.
A free BYOK proving tier, then $0.10 per 1,000 successful Flex requests. Inference bought through customer-owned accounts has no percentage markup.
Hobby is free for 10,000 requests; Pro lists $79/month, Team $799/month, and Enterprise is custom; managed credits state 0% markup.
Consider Helicone when prompt experiments, sessions, and deep developer observability are more important than minimal-data preventive governance.
We reviewed Helicone's linked documentation and pricing on August 7, 2026. Vendors measure requests, logs, credits, infrastructure, and capacity differently, so compare the underlying units and recheck current terms before purchasing.