Langfuse vs LiteLLM

LiteLLM is primarily an AI gateway. It provides an OpenAI-compatible API to 100+ LLMs, automatic spend tracking with cost attribution to keys/users/teams, budgets, rate limits, and fallbacks across providers. It also offers basic prompt management and guardrails, but its core strength is unified access and cost control. LiteLLM integrates with observability tools like Langfuse and OpenTelemetry for deeper monitoring. As of June 2026, LiteLLM is migrating core components to Rust for performance, and released Lite-Harness for self-hosted agentic coding environments.

Langfuse is an LLM observability and prompt management platform. It offers hierarchical traces, LLM-as-a-judge evaluations, one-click prompt deployment and rollback, a playground for side-by-side model comparison, and experiment management. New in June 2026: multi-modal datasets (images, audio, video), Monitors and Alerts (cost, quality, latency notifications via Slack/webhooks), a natural language 'Assistant' beta for querying traces, a filter search bar, and frontend feedback scores from the browser. Langfuse's instrumentation is OTel-native and integrates with 100+ frameworks including LiteLLM, LangChain, and Vercel AI SDK (with new beta package for v7).

In short: LiteLLM handles API routing and spend; Langfuse handles debugging and optimizing LLM calls. They complement each other: trace LiteLLM calls into Langfuse for full observability.

Both tools are freemium with open-source self-hosting options. LiteLLM offers a free open-source version (self-hosted) with core gateway features. Enterprise cloud or managed self-hosted plans include JWT auth, SSO, audit logs, and custom SLAs — pricing is custom per customer. Langfuse's open-source (MIT) version is fully self-hostable with all features. For Langfuse Cloud, there's a free tier, Team plan at $59/month (with higher limits and collaboration features), and Enterprise custom pricing for dedicated infrastructure, SOC 2, and HIPAA compliance. Both are cost-effective for small teams, but while LiteLLM's value is in replacing multiple API keys with one gateway, Langfuse's value is in reducing debugging and evaluation time. For very high volume, self-hosting both can keep costs predictable.