
Helicone AI
LangSmith
LangChain
PromptLayer
Portkey
Braintrust.dev
Openlayer
Langfuse is an open-source LLM engineering platform that helps teams collaboratively debug, analyze, and iterate on their LLM applications.

Braintrust
LangSmith
Helicone AI
FirstHelm - Steer your AI agents, don't just deploy them — a framework-agnostic AI agent control plane with live monitoring, guardrails, approvals, and EU AI Act / ISO 42001 compliance exports.

Which is more popular?
Based on our record, Langfuse seems to be more popular. It has been mentioned 32 times since March 2021.
Website, pricing, platforms and company facts side by side.
|
|
|
|
|---|---|---|
| Website | langfuse.com | firsthelm.dev |
| Pricing | ||
| Platforms | — | |
| Company | Startup from the United States | Startup from the United Kingdom · 1 - 9 employees · 2026 |
| Listed in |
In their own words, as submitted to SaaSHub.


Langfuse is an open-source LLM engineering platform designed to empower developers by providing insights into user interactions with their LLM applications. We offer tools that help developers understand usage patterns, diagnose issues, and improve application performance based on real user data....
FirstHelm is a control plane for your AI agents. It sits between your agent fleet (n8n, OpenAI, Anthropic, CrewAI, LangChain, Copilot Studio, or any custom agent — 13 platform guides, no code needed to start) and the rest of the world. Every action gets logged, checked against your rules, and —...
What each product offers, as listed by its team.


Possible disadvantages
Walkthroughs and reviews on video.
Langfuse in two minutes
No FirstHelm videos yet. You could help us improve this page by suggesting one.
How often each product is chosen within a category, 0–100% relative to the other.


As answered by people managing Langfuse and FirstHelm.
FirstHelm's answer:
FirstHelm is a control plane, not just a monitoring tool. Existing platforms show you what your AI agents did — FirstHelm decides what they're allowed to do. It combines live monitoring, guardrails and human-in-the-loop approvals in one place, and uniquely generates audit trails and compliance exports mapped to six frameworks (EU AI Act, ISO 42001, SOC 2, UK GDPR, NIST AI RMF, FCA) from your own live data. It's also framework-agnostic: the same control plane supervises agents built on n8n, OpenAI, Anthropic, CrewAI, LangChain, Copilot Studio, Vertex AI, Bedrock, Agentforce and more.
FirstHelm's answer:
Observability tools (LangSmith, Langfuse, Helicone) trace what happened after the fact. FirstHelm intervenes before the fact: expensive, risky or irreversible actions are held for a human decision, and unanswered approvals expire safely — silence is not consent. So while competitors give developers dashboards, FirstHelm gives compliance teams proof: 38 controls, readiness scores computed live, and exportable reports an auditor actually accepts. And you keep your existing stack — FirstHelm supervises it, whatever it's built on.
FirstHelm's answer:
Two groups. Developers and technical teams running autonomous AI agents in production (on n8n, LangChain, OpenAI and similar) who need visibility and a safety net. And the people holding them accountable: founders, compliance officers and operations leads in regulated or EU-exposed businesses who must evidence oversight under the AI Act and ISO 42001. FirstHelm is the bridge between them — one system both can point at.
FirstHelm's answer:
FirstHelm was built in 2026 by a solo founder watching businesses deploy AI agents faster than they could govern them. Tracing tools could tell you what an agent had already done — but nothing could stop it doing the wrong thing, or prove to a regulator that someone was steering. With the EU AI Act fully enforceable since August 2026, that gap became a legal problem, not just an engineering one. FirstHelm is the answer: the helm for a fleet that was sailing itself. Bootstrapped, UK-built, live today.
FirstHelm's answer:
Cloud SaaS built on the Base44 platform (frontend, backend, hosting, Postgres-backed data layer), with a REST API and Python SDK for agent integration. Payments and subscriptions via Stripe. Email infrastructure on IONOS. The product itself integrates with 13+ agent frameworks via HTTP endpoints — n8n, OpenAI, Anthropic, CrewAI, LangChain, AutoGen, Copilot Studio, Agentforce, Vertex AI, Bedrock, Azure AI Foundry, watsonx, or any custom agent.
Share your experience with using Langfuse and FirstHelm. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
External articles and on-site reviews we used to compare the two products.


Ten free AI prompt tools in 2026 across four categories: prompt generators (SurePrompts, Anthropic Console, OpenAI Playground), libraries (AIPRM, PromptHero, FlowGPT, Awesome ChatGPT Prompts), open-source workflow...
We have no reviews of FirstHelm yet. Be the first one to post
Recommendations tracked on public social media and blogs since March 2021.


Langfuse is the other serious option in this category if you also want observability, evals and traces bundled with prompt management. Different scope, more setup, worth comparing honestly. - Source: dev.to / 20 days ago
Langfuse with Microsoft.Extensions.AI has an appealing story: update prompts without redeploying. A prompt fetches its config blob—model, tokens, temperature—which the code passes straight to the LLM. - Source: dev.to / 24 days ago
Langfuse is not a replacement for OpenTelemetry; it is a specialization layer built on top of it. Langfuse was engineered specifically for the unique telemetry needs of LLM applications. It acts as the semantic layer that OTel lacks. - Source: dev.to / 29 days ago
Tracking FirstHelm since Sep 2026.
When comparing Langfuse and FirstHelm, you can also consider the following products.

Open-source LLM Observability for Developers
Compare Helicone AI to Langfuse or FirstHelm:

Braintrust connects companies with top technical talent to complete strategic projects and drive innovation. Our AI Recruiter can 100x your recruiting power.
Compare Braintrust to Langfuse or FirstHelm:

Build and deploy LLM applications with confidence
Compare LangSmith to Langfuse or FirstHelm:

Framework for building applications with LLMs through composability
Compare LangChain to Langfuse or FirstHelm:
The first platform built for prompt engineers
Compare PromptLayer to Langfuse or FirstHelm:

Build production-grade & reliable AI apps with Portkey
Compare Portkey to Langfuse or FirstHelm: