Decide whether you are replacing your provider gateway, your observability workflow, or both. That choice determines the migration and the right shortlist.
Teams reviewing Helicone and their LLM infrastructure
Keep the gateway
If routing already works, evaluate a new observability workflow separately before changing the request path.
Evaluate Lunary
Use a trial to connect application runs, conversations, feedback, and prompt investigation.
Evaluate Langfuse or LangSmith
Compare their tracing and evaluation workflows against the way your team tests and releases agents.
At a glance
| Current pain | Evaluate | Success condition |
|---|---|---|
| Hard to understand the customer interaction | Lunary conversation and trace workflow | A teammate explains the failure end to end |
| Need structured evaluation iterations | Langfuse or LangSmith | A repeatable comparison on representative cases |
| Need different provider routing | Gateway options as a separate decision | Errors, streaming, and fallback behavior verified |
| Need better exports | Existing Helicone ETL first | Complete bodies and metadata in a reconciled archive |
Separate request infrastructure from debugging
Helicone's AI Gateway provides a common way to access model providers. Replacing that component affects endpoint configuration, credentials, model identifiers, and failure behavior. Replacing an analytics destination is a different change. Document which Helicone capabilities are in your serving path before turning off an integration or changing a base URL.
Match the alternative to the missing context
Consider Lunary when a request log is only the beginning of the investigation and your team needs the surrounding conversation and application steps. Consider Langfuse when its tracing, datasets, and deployment approach match your engineering process. Consider LangSmith when evaluation and prompt work should sit close to the tracing workflow. None of these choices should be treated as a drop-in replacement for gateway behavior without a separate validation.
Do not reduce Helicone to a request counter
Helicone documents prompt management, datasets, data export, and an MCP server for querying observability data. Include the features you rely on in the comparison. For agents, test whether your instrumentation captures the tool execution itself, including failures and retries, rather than just the model's request to call a tool.
- Exercise a streaming response, provider error, and retried request.
- Check session IDs and custom properties across every hop.
- Keep provider costs and observability fees separate in the estimate.
Change one layer at a time
First validate the destination using a bounded workload and safe sample payloads. Preserve the gateway until the new tracing path is understood. If you later change routing, use a separate release with explicit rollback criteria. Export a historical sample with request and response bodies where appropriate; request metadata alone will not support every debugging or evaluation use case.
Common questions
Is Lunary a replacement for every Helicone gateway feature?
This guide does not claim gateway parity. Evaluate Lunary as the observability and development workflow, and verify routing requirements independently.
Does Helicone offer an MCP connection?
Yes. Its official documentation describes an MCP server for querying Helicone observability data. That is different from a documentation-only MCP server.
Sources & methodology
Lunary publishes this guide. We compare documented workflows and explain where each approach fits; this is not an independent benchmark or a hands-on product rating. Features, limits, and commercial terms can change. Check the linked vendor documentation before deciding.