AgentWach vs Helicone
Helicone tracks LLM requests. AgentWach adds agent loop detection and hard stops.
Helicone is a great drop-in proxy for logging LLM requests and analyzing latency or cost per call. AgentWach treats agents as first-class objects — it groups tool calls, detects loops between them, and enforces hard budget stops across providers.
Where Helicone shines
- One-line proxy install for OpenAI-compatible APIs.
- Fine-grained request logs with cache and retry handling.
- Cost breakdowns per user, prompt, or model.
- Useful for backend engineers who want pure request-level observability.
Where AgentWach wins
- Agent-first data model: events grouped by agent, run, and tool call.
- Loop detection — flags repeated tool-call patterns and stops the agent.
- Hard budget caps enforced via stop=true, not just alerts.
- GitHub Copilot premium-credit tracking alongside API spend.
- Multi-channel alerting (Slack, Discord, PagerDuty, SMS, webhook).
Feature comparison
| Feature | AgentWach | Helicone |
|---|---|---|
| Real-time token & cost tracking | Yes | Yes |
| Cross-provider rollup (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Copilot) | Yes | OpenAI-compatible proxy |
| GitHub Copilot premium-request credit tracking | Yes | No |
| Hard budget caps that stop agents mid-run Returns stop=true on the next ingest call. | Yes | No |
| Tool-call loop detection | Yes | No |
| Prompt-injection scanner (heuristic, 20+ rules) | Yes | No |
| Slack / Discord / PagerDuty / SMS alerts | Yes | Email/Slack only |
| Tracing & evaluation tooling | Replay + diagnose | Request-level |
| Browser extension (ChatGPT / Claude / Gemini capture) | Yes | No |
| Free tier | Yes | Yes |
The bottom line
If you only need raw LLM request logs, Helicone is fast to install. If you're running agents — anything with planners, tools, or sub-agents — AgentWach is the layer that actually stops them when they go sideways.