EvalGuard vs Helicone.
Open-source LLM observability + cost dashboard, ClickHouse-backedHelicone (helicone.ai, YC W23) is an open-source LLM observability platform focused on tracing, cost tracking, and a real-time dashboard. ClickHouse-backed for trace scale, Helm chart published, free OSS tier with paid SaaS. Strong observability primitives, but no eval framework, no red-team library, no runtime firewall.
across the 14-row feature matrix · 1 row unverified, counted for neither side · see “where Heliconeleads” below
Competitor data (GitHub stars, downloads, feature counts, funding / acquisition status) verified as of 2026-08-10. EvalGuard's own counts are sourced live from the drift-checked registry.
Coverage at a glance
EvalGuard vs Helicone, by the numbers
Where both platforms publish a number, here's the gap. Our values come straight from the drift-checked registry; Helicone's are quoted as published.
| Feature | EvalGuard | Helicone |
|---|---|---|
| Attack Plugins | 300+ | 0 |
| Eval Scorers | 200+ | 7 presets + custom LLM-as-judge |
| LLM Providers | 90+ (typed registry) | Proxy-based (broad) |
| Compliance Frameworks | 50 | Not published |
| LLM Firewall | 5-layer, 3.67ms p95 | No |
| LLM Gateway | Yes | Yes (proxy-based) |
| Agent Tracing (OTel) | Yes | Yes (custom format) |
| Cost / FinOps Analytics | Yes | Yes (their strength) |
| ClickHouse for trace scale | Roadmap (Tier A) | Yes (today) |
| Red Team Suite | Yes (300+ plugins, 100+ strategies) | No |
| Prompt IDE | Yes | Yes (editor + versioning API) |
| Open Source | Apache 2.0 (SDKs + CLI) | Apache 2.0 |
| Helm chart | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted Docker | Yes | Yes |
Why choose EvalGuard over Helicone
- Helicone is observability-first — we ship red team (300+ plugins, 100+ strategies), a runtime firewall and compliance (50 frameworks) alongside the same observability surface
- Runtime LLM firewall at 3.67ms p95 — Helicone has no inline protection layer
- 200+ scorers as a first-party registry — Helicone ships 7 evaluator presets and otherwise expects you to write your own
- Compliance Center with 50 frameworks (OWASP LLM Top 10, EU AI Act, ISO 42001, NIST AI RMF, India DPDP, HIPAA + 44 more)
- BYOK encryption with Vault-backed envelope encryption, so provider keys are never stored in a form our own operators can read
Where Helicone leads
- Helicone is mature on cost/observability (their primary focus) — strong real-time cost dashboard with caching analytics
- ClickHouse-backed trace storage scales past 500K traces/day — we use Postgres until volume justifies the migration
- Strong YC W23 community + funding; 4K+ GitHub stars
- Helicone ships a prompt editor with a full versioning API (promote, subversion, labels) — this page previously said it had no prompt IDE, which was false
- Proxy-based gateway covers more provider edge cases since it intercepts at the HTTP layer
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