Braintrust is an evaluation and experimentation platform. It shines when you're running many prompt variants against a dataset and comparing quality. It stores traces too, but live production monitoring is not its focus. Agent Status is the opposite: we don't optimise for experimentation; we optimise for catching production problems the second they happen.
One-line summary
- Agent Status: Agent Status is a production outside-in monitor. Live validations, per-request assertions, regional alerting.
- Braintrust: Braintrust is an eval-first platform. Dataset-backed A/Bs, experiment runs, and scoring of prompt and model variants.
Feature matrix
| Capability | Agent Status | Braintrust |
|---|---|---|
| Eval-first experiment runs | No | Native |
| Dataset management + versioning | No | Native |
| Production outside-in validations | Native | No |
| Per-request content assertions in prod | Native | Limited |
| Scorer libraries (custom + LLM-as-judge) | No | Native |
| Self-host option | No | Partial |
| Real-time paging on a failing validation | Native | No |
When to use Agent Status
- You need to know your users' experience, not your servers'.
- Your agent depends on a third-party model provider and you need to catch their outages.
- Your users are distributed geographically and you need regional alerting.
- You want alerts in seconds, not minutes of aggregated latency data.
When to use Braintrust
- You're iterating on prompts and want to A/B across datasets.
- You need reproducible eval runs with versioned scorers.
- You're picking between models and want a rigorous head-to-head.
- You need to share experiment results with stakeholders who don't touch code.
What Braintrust does that we don't
Experiment-driven development. If your team's workflow is 'write a prompt, run it against 500 dataset rows, compare scores, ship the winner' - Braintrust is the best tool on the market for that loop.
What we do that Braintrust doesn't
Braintrust's eval loop ends when you deploy. Agent Status picks up there. Outside-in validating, regional alerting, and per-request assertions are what catch the production problems that no eval can predict.
Pricing
- Agent Status: Free tier: 30 tests/month, 1 agent, 3 regions, 6-hour minimum interval. Paid tiers unlock unlimited agents and regions with usage-based pricing. No per-seat fees.
- Braintrust: Free tier for individuals. Team plans starting at ~$249/mo + usage, enterprise custom.
Most teams use both
Braintrust ships your agent confidently; Agent Status catches it when production reality disagrees. A team serious about quality runs both.
Related
- /vs/arize-phoenix - Phoenix comparison.
- /vs/langfuse - Langfuse comparison.
- /blog/what-is-outside-in-monitoring - Outside-in primer.
- /platform - The product overview.
Frequently asked questions
Is Agent Status a replacement for Braintrust?
No. Braintrust is an evaluation-first experimentation platform used pre-production. Agent Status is outside-in production monitoring. They cover different stages.
Should I use both?
Yes - Braintrust to evaluate and iterate before shipping, Agent Status to validate behavior continuously in production.
What does Agent Status add over Braintrust?
Live, region-aware probing of your deployed agent with SLO alerting, versus offline eval scoring of candidate prompts and models.
Does Agent Status do evals?
It runs assertion-based validations against production responses; for large offline eval sweeps, an evaluation platform like Braintrust is the better fit.
Try Agent Status alongside Braintrust
Free tier includes 30 tests/month on 1 agent from 3 regions - enough to validate the pattern against your real traffic with a 10-minute setup and no code changes to the agent itself. See pricing or jump straight to the platform overview.
