Leanroute vs Helicone

Routing-first gateway vs observability-first proxy.

Helicone is the LLM observability layer — rich dashboard, prompt versioning, traces, evals. We're the routing layer — multi-provider catalog, cheaper-model swaps, BYOK, billing. The honest answer is that they're mostly complementary, not competitive. Many teams use both: point Helicone at our base URL and you get APAC routing + deep analytics in one stack.

Snapshot date: June 2026. Cross-checked against docs.helicone.ai.

TL;DR

Pick Leanroute if your primary need is multi-provider routing, BYOK with encryption, APAC + India catalog depth, hosted billing, or spend caps that enforce hard at the gateway edge. Pick Helicone if your primary need is rich per-request analytics, prompt versioning, traces, or running evals against production traffic. Pick both if you want APAC routing AND deep analytics — the two layers chain cleanly.

Where we differ

Dimension	Leanroute	Helicone
Primary focus	Routing + flat BYOK subscription or top-up-fee billing	Observability + prompt tooling
Fee model	$15/$25 BYOK subscription or 5% top-up-fee credits; $0 per request	Free tier; paid plans tiered by volume
Open source?	No (managed SaaS)	Yes (MIT)
APAC + India provider catalog	First-class (10 providers)	Passes through whatever you point at
Multi-account failover	Yes (5xx → same-tier alt, #23)	Out of scope (logging layer)
Cheaper-model swaps	Yes, per-org policy (#36)	Out of scope
Prompt versioning + experiments	No	Yes, first-class
Per-request log + dashboard	Yes	Yes (deeper analytics, traces)
BYOK encryption at rest	AES-256-GCM under master key	Pass-through; you manage keys
Per-org cache scoping	Yes, namespaced	Cache is optional middleware
Data residency	Singapore	US (default); EU on paid
Streaming + tool calls everywhere	Yes (#25)	Pass-through (depends on upstream)
Spend caps + rate limits	Hard, gateway-edge	Alerts (notification-only)

Using them together

Helicone's OpenAI-compatible proxy mode accepts a custom base URL via the Helicone-Target-URL header. Point that at our gateway and Helicone records the request shape, latency, and cost while we do the actual routing.

# Request goes: your app → Helicone → Leanroute → upstream provider
curl https://oai.helicone.ai/v1/chat/completions \
  -H "authorization: Bearer gw_live_YOUR_LEANROUTE_KEY" \
  -H "Helicone-Auth: Bearer sk-helicone-YOUR_HELICONE_KEY" \
  -H "Helicone-Target-URL: https://api.leanroute.dev/v1" \
  -H "content-type: application/json" \
  -d '{ "model": "anthropic/claude-sonnet-4-6", "messages": [...] }'

You see request analytics + prompt versions in Helicone, you pay Leanroute's flat $15/$25 BYOK subscription (or 5%-at-top-up credits, either way zero per-request markup), and the APAC + India catalog is available to both.

Where Helicone wins

Observability depth. Traces, span linking, conversation grouping, prompt diffing. Our request log is for cost accounting; theirs is for product introspection.
Prompt versioning + experiments. First-class. Store prompts, version them, A/B test in production. Out of scope for us.
Evals. Run evaluator chains against production traffic. We don't do this.
Open source. MIT. Self-host the proxy + dashboard if you want full control.