Helicone is an inside-out gateway and analytics tool for LLM calls. It sits between your code and the model provider, logging every call with zero code changes. Helicone's strength is the zero-setup gateway approach - if you can change your base URL, you get observability. Agent Status is complementary: Helicone tells you what went through the wire, Agent Status tells you whether your users got a good answer.
One-line summary
- Agent Status: Agent Status validations your deployed agent from outside your stack and asserts on the response the user would have received.
- Helicone: Helicone is a drop-in proxy for LLM providers. Change your base URL and get cost, latency, and cache analytics on every call.
Feature matrix
| Capability | Agent Status | Helicone |
|---|---|---|
| Zero-setup gateway (base URL change only) | No | Native |
| Outside-in multi-region validations | Native | No |
| Per-provider caching | No | Native |
| Custom properties + user segmentation | Limited | Native |
| Semantic assertions on agent output | Native | No |
| Prompt management | No | Native |
| Geographic user-experience alerting | 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 Helicone
- You want LLM observability without touching your code.
- You need caching and request routing across providers.
- You want per-user cost breakdowns and rate limits.
- You need to segment calls by custom properties.
What Helicone does that we don't
Zero-setup instrumentation. Helicone's gateway approach means you can drop it in without changing your app code at all - just swap the base URL. For teams that don't control the agent codebase, that's a huge advantage.
What we do that Helicone doesn't
Outside-in validation that catches what a gateway can't see: regional outages on the provider's side, semantic failures in the response body, and the geographic dimension of user experience.
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.
- Helicone: Free tier at 10k requests/month. Paid plans from $20/mo, usage-based at scale.
Most teams use both
Helicone excels at the 'what went over the wire' question. Agent Status answers 'what did the user actually experience'. Teams running Claude and OpenAI in production typically end up running both - Helicone for the proxy-level analytics, Agent Status for the outside-in user-facing check.
Related
- /vs/langfuse - Langfuse comparison.
- /vs/openllmetry - OpenLLMetry comparison.
- /status-monitoring/openai - OpenAI status monitoring.
- /platform - The product overview.
Frequently asked questions
Is Agent Status a replacement for Helicone?
No. Helicone is a zero-setup inside-out LLM gateway that captures what went over the wire. Agent Status validates what the user actually experienced, end to end.
Should I run both?
Usually yes - Helicone for proxy-level analytics and caching, Agent Status for outside-in user-facing checks. They cover different layers.
What does Agent Status add over Helicone?
Active validation from 70 countries with content assertions and SLO-based alerting, rather than passive logging of requests that pass through the proxy.
Does Agent Status require routing traffic through a proxy?
No. It probes your agent's public endpoint externally, so there's no gateway to add to your request path.
Try Agent Status alongside Helicone
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.
