Curate-Me vs Helicone

Helicone is an open-source LLM observability platform and AI gateway. Over three years, Helicone’s users processed 14.2 trillion tokens, and 16,000 organizations trusted it with their LLM infrastructure. In March 2026, Helicone was acquired by Mintlify; the platform is now in maintenance mode (security updates, new models, bug fixes), with Mintlify guiding customers toward migration.

Curate-Me is the integrated alternative that’s still independent and shipping — gateway, governance, managed runners (private beta), and dashboard as one product. If you’re already on Helicone and looking at what comes next, this comparison is for you.

Feature comparison

Where Helicone is stronger

• Open-source: Apache-2.0 license, self-hostable, vibrant community (~3K GitHub stars pre-acquisition).
• Provider breadth: 100+ providers with community-contributed integrations.
• Prompt management: Built-in prompt versioning, experiments, and prompt-as-code workflows.
• Maturity in observability: 14.2T tokens processed across 16K orgs — battle-tested at scale.
• Caching: Multi-tier cache with semantic similarity — sophisticated and well-tuned.
• Migration tooling: Mintlify is actively investing in migration paths from Helicone to other platforms.

Where Curate-Me is stronger

• Active development: Helicone is in maintenance mode; we ship new features weekly. The roadmap is governance, runners, and integrated agent orchestration — not knowledge infrastructure.
• Managed runners: Full agent execution environments with lifecycle management, desktop streaming, and fleet orchestration. Helicone is observability + proxy only.
• In-container governance: Our MCP server runs inside the execution environment with 50 tools for cost caps, tool restrictions, A2A communication, and session management. Helicone governance stops at the API boundary.
• HITL approvals: High-cost or sensitive requests can be held for human review with auto-replay on approval. Required for EU AI Act Article 14 compliance.
• Content safety: Built-in prompt injection and jailbreak detection with an optional AI classifier to reduce false positives. Not available in Helicone.
• Integrated platform: Proxy + runners + governance + dashboard as one product. Helicone customers typically stitched it with E2B (sandboxes) + a runner platform.

When to choose Helicone

• You’re already running Helicone happily and the maintenance mode roadmap meets your needs
• You need a self-hosted, open-source observability platform and can accept the trajectory under Mintlify
• Prompt management is a core requirement (we don’t ship this today)
• You want to stay on Apache-2.0 software you can fork

When to choose Curate-Me

• You’re evaluating where to migrate post-acquisition and want an actively developed, independent platform
• You run AI agents that need execution environments — not just LLM call observability
• You need governance beyond logging: HITL, content safety, in-container controls
• You want one platform instead of stitching Helicone + E2B + a governance tool
• You need an immutable audit trail for regulatory compliance (EU AI Act, SOC 2)

Migration from Helicone

If you’re moving off Helicone, the lift is small:

1. Swap the base URL — your application code stays the same. Helicone proxies via https://oai.helicone.ai/v1; Curate-Me proxies via https://api.curate-me.ai/v1/openai.
2. Swap the auth header — Helicone-Auth: Bearer ... becomes X-CM-API-Key: cm_sk_....
3. Map custom properties — Helicone’s user/session properties map to Curate-Me’s org context (X-Org-ID) and trace context (traceparent).
4. Cost data — Helicone’s per-user cost views map to Curate-Me’s hierarchical Org → Team → Key budgets.

Most teams complete migration in under a day. See the Quick Start for the full setup.

Ready to try it? Follow the Quick Start to connect in under 5 minutes.