Opik vs Helicone in 2026 - One Is Growing, One Is Winding Down

This one is close to settled before you compare a single feature. Helicone was a clean, open-source, proxy-based observability tool - and Mintlify acquired it on 3 March 2026 and put it in maintenance mode. Security patches, bug fixes and new-model support only, no roadmap, and Mintlify is actively helping customers migrate off. Opik, meanwhile, is the fastest-growing open-source observability project of its peers and the cheapest managed cloud in the category.

So this is not a fair fight on trajectory. But plenty of teams are on Helicone today and want to know what they are trading up to, and the proxy model Helicone did well is a genuinely different architecture. So here is the honest read. I have added Langfuse as the third option, because it is the other open-source default worth weighing.

The short version

Tool	Best for	Starting price	Self-host	Status
Opik	Cheapest managed cloud, permissive OSS	Free / $19/mo	Free, Apache-2.0, full features	Fastest-growing
Helicone	Nobody new - maintenance mode	Free / $79/mo	Free, Apache-2.0, but frozen	Winding down
Langfuse	The established open-source default	Free / $29/mo	Free, MIT, near-complete	Actively developed

Opik: the fastest-growing open-source option

Opik is Comet’s open-source observability and eval platform, and it does something no one else here quite matches. The OSS build is Apache-2.0 with the full feature set self-hosted - unlimited spans, members and retention, no gates. That is the most permissive license in the category, and the self-hosted product is the real product, not a hobbled core. On the cloud, Pro is $19/mo for 100k spans, the cheapest paid tier of the major platforms, with $5 per additional 100k. It is the fastest-growing project of its peers at roughly 20.8k GitHub stars, and the eval side is real too - LLM-as-judge, code metrics, online evaluation, guardrails and an Agent Optimizer. It is backed by Comet, an established company since 2017.

The honest gotcha is per-seat pricing at scale. The $19 headline is the small-team configuration - the recurring complaint is that seat costs climb as the team grows. A few users report UI slowdown on very large projects, and OTel is one ingestion path here, not the native architecture. None of that undercuts the core value, but if you are a big team, model the seat cost first.

Helicone: clean product, frozen roadmap

Before anything else about Helicone, the fact that decides it. Mintlify acquired Helicone on 3 March 2026 and put it in maintenance mode. Only security patches, bug fixes and new-model support ship. No new integrations, no new analytics, no roadmap, and Mintlify is helping existing customers migrate off. For a new buyer that single fact overrides everything.

The product itself was tidy. Helicone is the lightest-weight of the major tools - a logging proxy first. You change your API base URL to route calls through it, and it logs everything with zero code changes, in any language, for any provider. There is an async SDK logging mode when you do not want the proxy in your critical path. By the time Mintlify bought it, it had processed 14.2 trillion tokens across roughly 16,000 organizations.

Two gotchas, one structural and one fatal. Structurally, the proxy sits in the hot path of every LLM call - a single point of failure. If Helicone is down, your calls fail even when OpenAI and Anthropic are healthy, and every proxied call adds latency (Helicone cites around 10ms). The fatal one is the maintenance-mode status. Self-hosting a frozen open-source codebase whose own creator is pointing people to the exit is a weak bet, no matter how clean the tool is. If you are on it, use the runway to plan your migration.

Langfuse: the established default

If you want an open-source platform with the longest track record, Langfuse is it. It is MIT-licensed, self-hosts free with only three features enterprise-gated, and runs about $101/mo at 1M events managed. It had over 2,000 paying customers at its January 2026 ClickHouse acquisition and is used by 19 of the Fortune 50.

Its catch is operational. Langfuse v3 needs Postgres plus ClickHouse, Redis and S3-compatible storage - four services - and the migration to that architecture is where self-hosters get stuck. If you can run it, it is the most proven open-source pick. Opik is the simpler self-host with fewer moving parts.

Opik vs Helicone: which should you pick?

• You are evaluating fresh in 2026 - Opik. Helicone is a dead end for new adopters, full stop.
• You want the cheapest managed cloud with a clean license - Opik at $19/mo.
• You are on Helicone today - plan your exit, and Opik or Langfuse are the natural landing spots.
• You specifically loved Helicone’s zero-code proxy - know that Portkey is a live gateway with a similar drop-in model, but for pure observability, instrument with Opik’s SDK instead.
• You want the most proven open-source track record - Langfuse, if you can run the four-service self-host.

The honest case for staying on Helicone a little longer: the Apache-2.0 self-host still works, and if all you need is a lightweight logging proxy while you plan a migration, the runway is real. Just do not build anything new on it.

For the wider field, see our Helicone alternatives and Opik alternatives breakdowns, or the head-to-head Opik vs Langfuse. Every price and date here was read from each vendor’s own materials on 26 July 2026. This category ships breaking changes monthly, so we re-verify every 30 days.