Helicone monitors your LLM API calls. AgentShield monitors your AI agents — their decisions, risks, costs, and compliance.
Helicone is an LLM gateway and monitoring tool. AgentShield is an agent governance and safety platform. Here's what that means in practice.
LLM Gateway + Observability
Agent Governance & Safety Platform
This is the fundamental difference. Helicone sees individual API calls. AgentShield sees the agent as a whole.
The API call succeeded. But what did the agent actually do with it?
The agent hallucinated a discount. Risk detected before it reaches the customer.
A detailed look at what each platform offers.
| Feature | Helicone | AgentShield |
|---|---|---|
| Observability | ||
| LLM request logging | ✓ | ✓ |
| Agent-level span trees | ~ | ✓ |
| Token & latency tracking | ✓ | ✓ |
| Session grouping | ✓ | ✓ |
| Gateway Features | ||
| Semantic caching | ✓ | ✗ |
| Rate limiting | ✓ | ✗ |
| Provider routing & fallbacks | ✓ | ✗ |
| Request retries | ✓ | ✗ |
| Risk & Safety | ||
| Real-time output risk analysis | ✗ | ✓ |
| Hallucination detection | ✗ | ✓ |
| Prompt injection detection | ~ | ✓ |
| Adversarial testing suite | ✗ | ✓ |
| Risk-level alerts | ✗ | ✓ |
| Governance | ||
| Human-in-the-loop approvals | ✗ | ✓ |
| Approval audit trail | ✗ | ✓ |
| Configurable approval rules | ✗ | ✓ |
| Cost Management | ||
| Cost per request | ✓ | ✓ |
| Cost per agent | ✗ | ✓ |
| Budget limits per agent | ✗ | ✓ |
| Budget alerts | ✗ | ✓ |
| Compliance | ||
| EU AI Act compliance reports | ✗ | ✓ |
| PDF report download | ✗ | ✓ |
| SOC-2 / HIPAA | $799/mo+ | — |
| Integration | ||
| Integration method | Proxy (URL swap) | SDK (3 lines) |
| LangChain support | ~ | ✓ |
| CrewAI support | ✗ | ✓ |
| Open source | ✓ | ✗ |
✓ = Full support ~ = Partial / manual setup ✗ = Not available
Helicone is great at monitoring LLM API calls. But autonomous agents need more than API monitoring.
Helicone logs requests and responses. It doesn't analyze whether the agent's output is dangerous, hallucinated, or violates your policies. A 200 OK with harmful content looks the same as a perfect response.
Helicone offers SOC-2 and HIPAA compliance for their own platform — at $799/month. But it generates zero regulatory compliance reports for your AI agents. No EU AI Act support. No audit documentation.
When your agent decides to process a refund, send an email, or modify a database, Helicone won't stop it. There's no approve/reject mechanism. No human-in-the-loop. No governance layer.
Helicone tracks cost per request. But there are no per-agent budget caps, no automatic alerts when an agent hits 80% of its budget, and no way to stop a recursive loop before it runs up a $47,000 bill.
Helicone's compliance features start at $799/month. AgentShield includes compliance at $149/month.
+ usage-based overages
Predictable pricing
Yes. Helicone and AgentShield solve different problems and work well together.
Different layers of the stack. Different problems. Complementary tools.
It depends on what you're building and what problems you need to solve.
Add risk analysis, approval workflows, cost budgets, and compliance reports to your AI agents. 3 lines of code. Free to start.
Free tier — no credit card required.