Staxly

Langfuse vs LangSmith

Open-source LLM engineering platform — observability, prompts, evals
vs. LLM observability, testing & evaluation — by LangChain

Langfuse websiteLangSmith website

Pricing tiers

Langfuse

Hobby (Cloud Free)
Free. 50k units/month included. 30 days data access. 2 users. Community support.
Free
Self-Hosted (OSS)
MIT-licensed. Docker Compose or Kubernetes deployment. Unlimited.
$0 base (usage-based)
Core
$29/month. 100k units included ($8 per 100k overage). 90 days retention. Unlimited users. In-app support.
$29/mo
Pro
$199/month. 100k units included + same overage. 3 YEARS retention. Unlimited annotation queues. High rate limits.
$199/mo
Teams Add-on
+$300/month. Adds Enterprise SSO + fine-grained RBAC + dedicated Slack support to Pro.
$300/mo
Enterprise
$2,499/month. Everything + custom rate limits, uptime SLA, dedicated support engineer. Yearly options.
$2499/mo
Langfuse website

LangSmith

Developer (Free)
Free forever. 5,000 traces/month. 14-day retention. 1 seat. Basic evaluations.
Free
Plus
$39/seat/month. 10k base traces included ($2.50 per 1k overage). Full evaluations, custom dashboards, email support.
$39/mo
Enterprise
Custom. Self-host option, SSO, custom retention, dedicated support.
Custom
LangSmith website

Free-tier quotas head-to-head

Comparing hobby on Langfuse vs developer on LangSmith.

MetricLangfuseLangSmith
No overlapping quota metrics for these tiers.

Features

Langfuse · 16 features

  • Annotation QueuesHuman reviewers rate traces. Unlimited on Pro+.
  • DashboardsAggregate metrics, cost, quality across projects.
  • DatasetsCurate test sets from production traces. Run experiments.
  • EU Cloud RegionGDPR-compliant hosting in EU.
  • EvaluationsLLM-as-judge, manual scores, custom model-graded evaluators.
  • LLM Cost TrackingAutomatic cost calculation per provider/model.
  • OpenTelemetry NativeOTel SDK → Langfuse endpoint works out of box.
  • PlaygroundTest prompts + models + variables live.
  • Prompt ManagementVersion, tag, label prompts. Reference from code by label.
  • Public APIFull REST API for ingest, query, prompt management.
  • Python @observe decoratorOne-line decorator to trace any function.
  • Self-HostingDocker Compose + k8s Helm chart.
  • SessionsGroup related traces (conversations, agent runs).
  • TracingCapture every LLM call, tool call, nested span with inputs/outputs/cost.
  • Users TrackingSegment traces by user ID, track per-user cost.
  • WebhooksSubscribe to trace completion events.

LangSmith · 14 features

  • AlertsThreshold alerts on latency, cost, eval metrics.
  • Annotation QueuesHuman-review workflows for trace quality rating.
  • Custom DashboardsAggregate metrics dashboards per project/tag.
  • DatasetsCollect examples → use as eval sets or training data.
  • EvaluationsLLM-as-judge, embedding similarity, custom Python evaluators, offline batch eval
  • LangChain IntegrationAuto-trace any LangChain/LangGraph run with env var.
  • LangGraph IntegrationFirst-class trace + eval for LangGraph agents.
  • LLM TracingAutomatic trace every LLM call + tool call + chain step.
  • OpenTelemetry ExportExport traces as OTLP to Datadog/Honeycomb/etc.
  • PlaygroundTest prompts + models inline before deploying.
  • Prompt CanvasVisual prompt editor with live test + eval.
  • Prompt HubPublic + private prompt library with versioning.
  • Self-Hosted (Enterprise)Docker + k8s deployment in your infra.
  • Threads + SessionsGroup traces into conversational sessions.

Developer interfaces

KindLangfuseLangSmith
CLILangSmith CLI
SDKlangfuse-js, langfuse-pythonlangsmith-js, langsmith-python
RESTLangfuse REST APILangSmith REST API
MCPLangfuse MCP ServerLangSmith MCP
OTHERLangfuse Dashboard, OpenTelemetry endpointLangSmith Dashboard
Staxly is an independent catalog of developer platforms. Outbound links to Langfuse and LangSmith are plain references to their official websites. Pricing is verified against vendor pages at publication time — reconfirm before buying.

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