Helicone alternative
A Helicone alternative built for self-serve
Helicone earned its place as the easy LLM observability proxy: drop it in front of your calls and see everything. But observability tells you what already happened. It doesn't route, it doesn't screen, and it doesn't stop a bad request. With the project's momentum stalled, teams that need more than logs are looking for the next layer.
RemKey starts where Helicone stops. You keep the drop-in-proxy ergonomics, one base URL, same wire format, but the proxy now does something: it routes each request to the right tier with an LLM classifier, screens every request for PII and prompt injection fail-closed, governs agent MCP tool calls against an allowlist, and writes a signed, hash-chained audit trail instead of a plain log.
Helicone's logs are observability you read after the fact. RemKey's audit trail is evidence, tamper-evident and verifiable offline by a CISO. And because RemKey ingests Helicone-style config, moving over is a translate step, not a re-instrumentation. Grandfathered credits cover the switch.
Helicone vs RemKey
| Capability | Helicone | RemKey |
|---|---|---|
| Request/response logging | ✓ Yes, its core strength | ✓ Yes, and hash-chained + signed |
| OpenAI/Anthropic-compatible proxy | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes, Bearer and x-api-key |
| Model routing to the right tier | ✗ Not a routing layer | ✓ LLM classifier routing (96% acc.) |
| PII + injection guardrails | ✗ Observability, not enforcement | ✓ Fail-closed on every request |
| Tamper-evident audit export | ✗ Logs (mutable store) | ✓ Ed25519-signed, verify offline |
| MCP tool-call governance | ✗ No | ✓ Fail-closed allowlist |
| Actively shipping | ✗ Stalled / frozen | ✓ Yes |
| Migration importer + credits | ✗ n/a | ✓ Imports Helicone config, free window |
Comparison reflects the self-serve experience and public positioning. We credit what Helicone does well and only claim deltas that are real.
Who each is for
Choose Helicone if…
Teams whose only need is to see and log LLM traffic, and who are happy with a read-only observability layer.
Choose RemKey if…
Teams who've outgrown 'just log it' and need the proxy to route, enforce policy, and produce a signed audit trail, without re-instrumenting their app.
Migration is a translate step, not a rewrite. Paste your Helicone config into RemKey's importer. You get an upgrade report, the list of provider keys to connect, and a grandfathered free window so switching costs nothing while you validate.