Vatan Gateway vs Helicone
Helicone is observability first and open source.
Helicone is observability first and open source. If what you want is to see what your LLM calls are doing, it is a good and cheap answer. We are a control plane: the cap that refuses, the scan that blocks, and the tool approval, not only the chart afterwards.
Use Helicone if
You want open-source observability you can self-host, and you do not need anything to be refused. Watching and governing are different jobs and they do the first one well.
| Vatan | Helicone | |
|---|---|---|
| Licence | Closed, hosted | Open source |
| Observability | Requests, sessions, end users, cost | Dashboard, sessions, users, HQL |
| Spend cap that refuses An alert tells you afterwards. A hold is what stops the spend happening. | Held against the wallet before the call | Rate limits and alerts |
| Prompt-injection blocking | Six detectors, block or flag | no |
| Tool servers | The whole MCP plane | no |
| Compliance | no | None listed |
Read off https://www.helicone.ai on 28 August 2026. If we have it wrong, tell us and we will fix the page.
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