Helicone is a strong LLM observability product with an optional proxy. ScopeVeil bundles gateway, prepaid billing, and the same observability in one platform. Here is the unvarnished comparison.
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baseURL and apiKey. Drop the Helicone-Auth header and your OpenAI SDK does not change. Updated for what each platform actually shipped as of May 2026.
| Feature | ScopeVeil | Helicone |
|---|---|---|
| OpenAI SDK compatible | Yes | Yes |
| Primary product surface Helicone leads with analytics. ScopeVeil leads with a billable gateway plus the same analytics. | Gateway, billing, and observability bundled | Observability with optional proxy |
| Native billing with prepaid credits | Yes, Stripe-backed credits with transparent markup | Not the primary product; you pay providers directly |
| Cost analytics with markup breakdown | Built-in, per-request, with XLSX export | Cost tracking based on observed usage |
| Observability without the proxy | Yes, free up to 500k events/month via SDK | Yes, async logging available |
| Provider catalog Helicone has broader integration coverage today. ScopeVeil keeps a curated set focused on first-party providers. | OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Mistral, Cohere, Groq, plus 9 more | 200+ integrations across providers and frameworks |
| Proxy vs async ingest Helicone lets you decouple logging from the request path. ScopeVeil keeps one mode to keep billing accurate. | Always proxy, single hop | Proxy mode or async ingestion |
| Self-hosted option | Yes, on Enterprise (full stack in your VPC) | Yes, available |
| Single login for gateway and analytics | Yes | Yes |
| Privacy posture Both platforms take privacy seriously. ScopeVeil enforces it at the SDK schema level. | Operational metadata only; prompt content excluded by schema at ingest | Configurable; supports redaction and on-prem deployments |
Highlights mark areas where ScopeVeil has a clearly different posture today. Helicone is a great product. It is a different bet on what the core surface should be.
Top up credits with Stripe, set hard caps per project, and read every request with raw provider cost and your markup side by side. The dashboard exports XLSX for the monthly close.
See the pricing calculator →On the Enterprise tier the entire stack runs as a docker-compose bundle inside your own infrastructure. No request body ever crosses the boundary of your VPC. Useful when compliance, paranoia, or both is the constraint.
Read the security posture →Already routing your own provider keys? Drop in the SDK and get the same dashboard for free up to 500k events per month. You do not need to migrate traffic to get the analytics. The gateway is optional.
Quickstart in 60 seconds →If you are already on Helicone through the OpenAI SDK, here is the diff.
import OpenAI from 'openai';
const ai = new OpenAI({
- baseURL: 'https://oai.helicone.ai/v1',
- apiKey: process.env.OPENAI_API_KEY,
- defaultHeaders: { 'Helicone-Auth': `Bearer ${process.env.HELICONE_API_KEY}` },
+ baseURL: 'https://gateway.scopeveil.com/v1',
+ apiKey: process.env.SCOPEVEIL_KEY,
});
// Same SDK. Same model strings. Same response shape. One header less.
const r = await ai.chat.completions.create({
model: 'openai/gpt-4o-mini',
messages: [{ role: 'user', content: 'hello' }],
});That is the whole migration. No proxy auth header, no separate provider key plumbing. One credential covers gateway and analytics.
For the proxy use case, yes. Both expose an OpenAI-compatible HTTP API. Helicone also has async ingestion via SDK; ScopeVeil offers a comparable observability SDK that does not require the proxy if you want to keep your own routing.
Each request reserves an estimate, hits the upstream provider, then we charge the actual upstream cost plus your tier markup (5 to 15 percent). The dashboard splits the two so the markup is never hidden. With Helicone you typically pay providers directly and Helicone bills for the observability tier separately.
Of course. The two systems do not conflict. Most teams point one service at ScopeVeil first and compare the dashboards before switching the rest.
Helicone async mode keeps logging off the hot path entirely. ScopeVeil always proxies, so there is a small fixed overhead on top of the upstream call. For streaming we forward bytes as they arrive, so time-to-first-token tracks upstream closely.
Helicone has a wider catalog of integrations today, particularly for framework-specific SDKs. If you need one we have not shipped, point a non-critical service at ScopeVeil first and let us know what is missing. We prioritize requests from teams running real traffic.
For the hosted gateway, request and response bodies are read in-memory for token counting and discarded. We persist metadata only (model, tokens, latency, cost, your tags). For the self-hosted bundle, nothing leaves your VPC.
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