Helicone vs Sentry
Open-source LLM observability — 1-line integration via proxy
vs. Application monitoring, error tracking, tracing, session replay
Pricing tiers
Helicone
Hobby (Free)
10,000 requests/month. 7-day retention. 1 seat. Basic monitoring.
Free
Startup Discount
<2 years, <$5M funding: 50% off first year.
$0 base (usage-based)
Self-Hosted (OSS)
MIT-licensed. Run Helicone yourself for free.
$0 base (usage-based)
Pro
$79/month. 10k free + usage-based. Unlimited seats. Alerts, reports, HQL query language. 1-month retention.
$79/mo
Team
$799/month. 5 orgs, SOC-2 + HIPAA compliance, dedicated Slack, 3-month retention.
$799/mo
Enterprise
Custom MSA, SAML SSO, on-prem deploy, bulk discounts, forever retention.
Custom
Sentry
Developer (Free)
Single user. 5k errors + 5M spans + 5GB logs + 50 replays + 1GB attachments per month.
Free
Self-Hosted (OSS)
BSL-licensed. Docker-based deploy. Free for personal/internal, commercial requires license.
$0 base (usage-based)
Team
$26/mo annual ($29/mo). Unlimited users. 50k errors/mo. 20 custom dashboards. Third-party integrations.
$26/mo
Business
$80/mo annual. 90-day insights lookback, unlimited dashboards, anomaly-detection alerts, SAML + SCIM.
$80/mo
Enterprise
Custom. Dedicated TAM, premium support, single-tenant option.
Custom
Free-tier quotas head-to-head
Comparing hobby on Helicone vs self-hosted on Sentry.
| Metric | Helicone | Sentry |
|---|---|---|
| No overlapping quota metrics for these tiers. | ||
Features
Helicone · 16 features
- Alerts — Thresholds on error rate, latency, cost, usage. Pro+.
- Async Logging — Log AFTER the LLM call via SDK — zero added latency.
- Cost Tracking — Automatic cost calculation per call by provider/model.
- Dashboard — Request tables, aggregate metrics, cost breakdowns.
- Evaluators — LLM-as-judge + custom evaluators on runs.
- Experiments — A/B test different models/prompts.
- HQL (SQL over traces) — Query your logged data with SQL. Pro+.
- PII Redaction — Automatically scrub emails, credit cards, etc. from logs.
- Prompt Caching — Cache identical requests → save money.
- Prompts & Versions — Store + version + A/B test prompts.
- Proxy Mode — 1-line integration via base URL swap. Captures all requests.
- Rate Limiting — Per-user + per-key rate limit policies.
- Reports — Scheduled email reports with KPIs.
- Self-Hosting — Docker + k8s deployment.
- Sessions — Group related calls (chat sessions, agent runs).
- User Metrics — Per-user cost + usage segmentation.
Sentry · 16 features
- Alerts — Metric + issue-based alerts routed to Slack/PagerDuty/email/etc.
- Cron Monitoring — Check-in pings for scheduled jobs. Alert on missed/failed runs.
- Distributed Tracing — Performance monitoring spans across services. Connect frontend → backend → DB.
- Error Tracking — Capture exceptions with stack traces, breadcrumbs, tags, release info, user cont…
- Insights — Pre-built dashboards per domain: Frontend, Backend, Mobile, AI, Database, LLM, e…
- LLM Monitoring — Track OpenAI/Anthropic/etc calls, token usage, cost, errors.
- Logs — Centralized structured logging correlated with errors + traces.
- Profiling — CPU profiling for Python, Node.js, Go, PHP, Ruby, Android, iOS.
- Release Health — Adoption + crash-free rate per release version.
- Releases — Track deploys, commit hooks, source map upload, bisect.
- Seer (AI Debug) — Root cause analysis + fix suggestions for issues via AI.
- Self-Hosting — Docker-based self-host. Feature parity.
- Session Replay — Record DOM + network to replay user sessions that hit errors.
- Source Maps — Auto-symbolicate minified code. Upload via CLI or Webpack/Vite plugin.
- Uptime Monitoring — Synthetic checks for HTTP endpoints.
- User Feedback — In-app feedback widget tied to sessions.
Developer interfaces
| Kind | Helicone | Sentry |
|---|---|---|
| CLI | Helicone CLI | Sentry CLI |
| SDK | helicone (npm), helicone-python | sentry-android, @sentry/browser, sentry-cocoa (iOS), sentry-dotnet, sentry_flutter, sentry-go, sentry-java, @sentry/node, sentry-php, @sentry/react-native, sentry-ruby, sentry-sdk (Python), sentry-unity |
| REST | Async Logging API, Helicone Proxy, Query API (HQL) | Sentry REST API |
| MCP | — | Sentry MCP |
| OTHER | Helicone Dashboard, Webhooks | Webhooks (Alerts) |
Staxly is an independent catalog of developer platforms. Outbound links to Helicone and Sentry are plain references to their official websites. Pricing is verified against vendor pages at publication time — reconfirm before buying.
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