Best Helicone Alternative for AI Security (2026)

Helicone is the gold standard for LLM observability. But if you are shipping AI to production, observability is only one-third of what you need. This post explains why teams are adding Rakshex alongside — or replacing — Helicone for security, compliance, and cost governance.

What Helicone Does Well

Helicone excels at request logging, latency tracking, and cost attribution. If your only concern is "how much am I spending and where," Helicone is the best tool on the market.

Beautiful request tracing with full prompt/completion visibility
Cache hit rate analytics
Latency breakdown by model and provider
Custom properties for A/B testing
Free tier for small projects

Where Helicone Falls Short

The gap becomes obvious 3–6 months after going live. You have perfect visibility into latency, but zero protection against:

Prompt injection attacks reaching your model
PII leaking to third-party LLM providers
Undocumented API endpoints (shadow APIs)
Credential leaks in your Postman collections
Compliance auditors asking for PCI DSS mappings

Rakshex vs Helicone: Feature Map

Capability	Helicone	Rakshex
Request logging	✅	✅
Latency tracking	✅	✅
Cost attribution	✅	✅
Prompt injection detection	❌	✅
PII redaction	❌	✅
Shadow API discovery	❌	✅
Credential leak scanning	❌	✅
Kill switch / budget cap	⚠️ Alert only	✅ Hard stop
PCI DSS reporting	❌	✅
SOC 2 mapped findings	❌	✅
VS Code extension	❌	✅
GitHub PR scanning	❌	✅
Self-hosted option	❌	✅ Docker

Migration Path

You do not have to abandon Helicone immediately. Many teams run Rakshex alongside Helicone for 30 days, then migrate fully once they see the security findings Helicone never surfaced.

Export your Helicone logs via API
Import into Rakshex (5-minute guided process)
Run your first security scan on existing collections
Enable the kill switch with a monthly budget
Redirect traffic through Rakshex SDK or gateway

Pricing Reality Check

Helicone is free up to 10K requests/month, then $0.001 per request. Rakshex Pro is $99/month flat for unlimited scans and unlimited requests. If you process more than ~100K requests/month, Rakshex is cheaper. If you need security, there is no comparison.

The Verdict

If you only need observability, Helicone is the better choice. If you need observabilityplus security, compliance, and cost governance, Rakshex is the only platform that covers all three without stitching together 4+ tools.