Braintrust
Active observability for AI agents: trace, evaluate, and discover patterns at scale.
Braintrust earns its keep for teams running complex agents in production—its Topics feature automatically surfaces patterns you didn't know to look for, turning them into evals, which most competitors don't match. The live trace inspector and Brainstore database handle nested agent traces that choke traditional databases. If you're shipping multi-step agents at scale, this is a strong choice; simpler apps can make do with logging alone.
Verified 10d ago · liveness 87/100 · cite: rightaichoice.com/tools/braintrust
- Engineering teams shipping multi-step AI agents in production
- AI leads managing multi-model pipelines needing eval-driven quality gates
- Enterprises requiring HIPAA/GDPR compliance and hybrid deployment
- Teams scaling from first agent to hundreds of experiments needing pattern discovery
- Simple single-prompt apps that don't need multi-step tracing or evals
- Teams in early prototype phase without production traffic
- Users deeply invested in a single framework who prefer tight integration
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Skip Braintrust if you are building simple single-prompt apps that don't need multi-step tracing or evals, or if you're in early prototype phase without production traffic yet.
Going past 1 GB of processed data on Starter adds $4 per GB, which can add up quickly with high traffic.
Braintrust's Starter plan is free with unlimited users and 1 GB processed data, making it a great fit for small teams just getting started. The Pro plan at $249/month suits AI-native teams scaling to 5 GB and 50k scores. Compared to competitors like Langfuse (which has a similar freemium model but less focused on agent patterns), Braintrust offers more advanced pattern discovery and a custom database for complex traces.
In short
Braintrust — Active observability for AI agents: trace, evaluate, and discover patterns at scale. Best for Engineering teams shipping multi-step AI agents in production, AI leads managing multi-model pipelines needing eval-driven quality gates, Enterprises requiring HIPAA/GDPR compliance and hybrid deployment. Free to start; paid plans from $249/mo.
What's new in Braintrust
Checked 10 days agoAcross the latest 5 updates: 4 feature updates and 1 launch.
Trace and improve Cloudflare Agents
Braintrust publishes a guide on tracing and improving Cloudflare Agents, demonstrating how to use Braintrust's observability features with Cloudflare's agent environment.
Behavior specs, an open standard for supervising long-horizon agents
Braintrust introduces an open standard for supervising long-horizon agents, helping teams define expectations and monitor agent behavior over extended tasks.
Faster phrase search with shingled bloom filters in Brainstore
Braintrust details a performance improvement in Brainstore's phrase search using shingled bloom filters, enabling faster queries on large datasets.
How to eval stateful agents
Braintrust shares best practices for evaluating stateful agents, which maintain context across multiple interactions.
How we made continuous trace intelligence possible at scale
Engineering deep dive on scaling continuous trace intelligence, covering architecture and algorithms used in Braintrust's platform.
Viability Score
How well maintained and how widely used is Braintrust? Built from what the vendor actually publishes (docs, changelog, tutorials, integrations, pricing), whether the site is live, and how much real users discuss it. How we calculate this
Last calculated: September 2026
How we score →Key Features
- Real-time trace inspection
- Scalable agent trace ingestion
- Live performance monitoring
- Custom views and annotation
- Eval-driven scoring with LLMs, code, or humans
- Automated pattern discovery via Topics
- Online scoring with group scope by session key
- Quality gates and alerts
- Loop agent for generating prompts, scorers, and datasets
- Custom facets for business-specific dimensions
- Task-specific trace views
- One-click conversion of traces to eval datasets
- MCP server for IDE integration
- Built-in open-source models: Kimi K3 and DeepSeek V4 Flash
- Slack digest for Topics and Slack link previews
About Braintrust
Braintrust is an active observability platform for engineering teams shipping AI agents in production. It moves beyond passive logging by treating AI failures as systemic—silent drift, regressions, and complex multi-step traces—and provides tooling to catch issues before they impact users. The platform is built around three pillars: observe (real-time trace inspection), evaluate (eval-driven quality measurement), and discover (automated pattern finding via Topics). With Braintrust, you can inspect every agent trace, search across millions of logs, track latency, cost, and quality in real time, and block bad releases with quality gates. At its core, Braintrust is engineered for scale. Its custom Brainstore database is designed specifically for complex agent traces, which traditional databases handle inefficiently. The platform offers framework-agnostic SDKs for Python, TypeScript, Go, Ruby, C#, and more, plus integrations with OpenAI, LlamaIndex, LangChain, Bedrock, and other major providers. You get versioned datasets, side-by-side prompt and model comparison, and automated scoring using LLMs, code, or humans, enabling rigorous experiment workflows. Recent updates sharpen the workflow. Topics, now generally available, delivers a daily Slack digest of new activity in beta, and Slack link previews make sharing logs, traces, and experiments easier. Built-in open-source models now include Kimi K3 and DeepSeek V4 Flash, drawing from your monthly credits—no provider setup needed. The Loop AI agent can generate prompts, scorers, and datasets automatically, and custom facets let you define business-specific dimensions like use case, customer segment, or compliance. New group scope for online scoring lets you evaluate a set of related traces as a single unit based on a session key. Security is enterprise-ready out of the box: SOC 2 Type II certified, GDPR compliant, HIPAA compliant (with a BAA on Enterprise), SSO/SAML, RBAC, and hybrid deployment options. Trusted by teams at Coursera, Notion, Graphite, and more.
Behind the Verdict
Braintrust positions itself as the 'active observability' platform, and that distinction matters. Unlike passive log viewers, Braintrust actively analyzes your traces to surface patterns, score outputs, and block bad releases. The three pillars—Observe, Evaluate, Discover—are tightly integrated. You can start by logging traces with a few lines of SDK code, then immediately see latency, cost, and quality metrics. The trace inspector is fast thanks to Brainstore, a custom database built for nested agent traces. Traditional databases often choke on the size and complexity of agent spans; Brainstore handles millions of traces with sub-second queries. Strengths: Topics, now generally available, automatically clusters traces to reveal emerging patterns like task types, issues, and sentiment. It's a differentiator—most competitors require you to know what to look for. The Loop agent is another standout: describe a goal and it generates prompts, scorers, and datasets, effectively automating eval creation. Braintrust also integrates with a wide range of frameworks (LangChain, LlamaIndex, CrewAI, DSPy, etc.) and providers, so you avoid lock-in. The free tier is generous: unlimited users, projects, and datasets, with 1 GB of processed data and 10k scores per month. Weaknesses: The pricing model can be complex. Beyond the flat Pro fee, you pay for processed data and scores. If you have high traffic, these costs can add up. The Starter plan's 14-day retention might be too short for compliance teams. The Pro plan jumps to $249/month, which may be steep for small teams. Enterprise features like SAML SSO, RBAC, and HIPAA compliance are locked to the Enterprise tier, so mid-sized companies can't get them on Pro. Also, Braintrust's focus on agents means it's overkill for simple single-prompt applications. Where it fits: Engineering teams shipping multi-step agents at scale, AI leads managing multi-model pipelines, enterprises needing compliance and hybrid deployment. Not ideal for early prototypes or teams that just need basic logging.
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Real-world workflow fit
Concrete scenarios for the personas Braintrust actually fits — and what changes day-one when you adopt it.
Instrument a new LangChain agent with the Python SDK, send traces to Braintrust, and set up a quality gate that runs evals in CI on every prompt change.
Outcome: Catch regressions before they hit production, and use Topics to discover unexpected failure patterns in production traces, then convert them into dataset records for retraining.
Use custom facets to tag traces by use case and customer segment, and set up a daily Slack digest of emerging patterns from Topics.
Outcome: Get a business-level view of agent health without digging into raw logs, and share link previews of specific traces with stakeholders for faster decisions.
Start with the free Starter plan, log traces, and use the Loop agent to generate better prompts and scorers automatically.
Outcome: Quickly improve your support agent's accuracy without writing code, and scale to Pro when traffic grows beyond 1 GB of processed data.
Use Cases
- Monitor production LLM traces in real time to catch drift and hallucinations.
- Convert a bug-causing trace into a dataset record for regression testing.
- Run automated evals in CI to block prompt changes that degrade quality.
- Use Loop agent to autonomously generate better prompts and scorers.
- Collaborate with domain experts to review and annotate AI outputs.
- Compare two model versions side-by-side with hundreds of test cases.
- Get a daily Slack digest of emerging patterns from Topics.
- Deploy quality gates that automatically block bad releases.
Models Under the Hood
as of 2026-08-31
Limitations
- The free tier includes 1 GB processed data and 10k scores per month with 14-day retention, while the Pro plan ($249/month) offers 5 GB processed data, 50k scores, and 30-day retention.
- Additional usage beyond included amounts incurs costs, such as $4/GB and $2.50 per 1k scores.
- Enterprise custom plans are available for higher volume or privacy-sensitive data.
as of 2026-08-28
Verification history
We have re-verified Braintrust 15 times since . Each pass re-reads the vendor's own pages and re-checks every listed field against that evidence; passes where nothing had changed are marked as such.
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12-month cost
Project the real annual outlay, including the implied monthly cost when only an annual tier is published.
Vendor list price only. Add-on usage, seat overages, and contract minimums are surfaced under Hidden costs & gotchas.
Plans compared
For each published Braintrust tier: who it actually fits, and what it adds vs. the previous tier. Cross-reference the cost calculator above for projected annual outlay.
Starter
$0/mo
Ideal for
Solo developers or small teams exploring AI observability, with low trace volume (under 1 GB processed data and 10k scores per month) and no need for long retention.
What this tier adds
Free entry point with 14-day retention, 1 GB processed data, and 10k scores per month; includes unlimited users and projects.
Pro
$249/mo
Ideal for
AI-native teams with production agents that need more data capacity (5 GB processed, 50k scores), 30-day retention, and features like custom charts and environments.
What this tier adds
Adds 5 GB processed data, 50k scores, 30-day retention, custom charts, environments, priority support, RBAC, and unlimited human review scores compared to Starter.
Enterprise
Custom
Ideal for
Large organizations with high-volume or privacy-sensitive data requiring custom retention, on-prem deployment, HIPAA compliance, and uptime SLAs.
What this tier adds
Offers custom data retention, S3 export, RBAC, premium support, on-prem or hosted deployment, and HIPAA compliance (BAA) over Pro.
Where the pricing makes sense
The company stage and team size where Braintrust's pricing actually pencils out — and where peers do it cheaper.
Braintrust's Starter plan is free with unlimited users and 1 GB processed data, making it a great fit for small teams just getting started. The Pro plan at $249/month suits AI-native teams scaling to 5 GB and 50k scores. Compared to competitors like Langfuse (which has a similar freemium model but less focused on agent patterns), Braintrust offers more advanced pattern discovery and a custom database for complex traces.
Setup time & first value
How long it actually takes to get something useful out of Braintrust — broken out by persona, not the marketing-page minute.
For a developer, you can log your first trace in under 10 minutes with the quickstart guide. Running your first eval takes about 30 minutes, including setting up a dataset and scoring. Setting up Topics and custom views may take a couple of hours. Enterprises with compliance requirements will need additional time for SSO, RBAC, and custom deployment.
Switching to or from Braintrust
How to bring data in from common predecessors and how to get it back out — written for the switcher, not the buyer.
- →From Langfuse: Export your traces as JSON and import them into Braintrust using the SDK, then recreate your eval datasets.
- →From Arize Phoenix: Use the SDK to send traces directly to Braintrust, and manually port your eval scorers.
- →From custom observability stack: Use the SDK to log traces from your existing code with minimal changes, then gradually move evals over.
- ↗To Langfuse: Export your traces and datasets via the API, then import into Langfuse's format.
- ↗To Arize Phoenix: Use their ingestion API to replay traces exported from Braintrust.
- ↗To a custom observability platform: Use the SDK's export functionality to dump traces in a structured format like JSON.
Integrations
Resources & Guides
Tutorials & Learning
Official links
Tools that pair well with Braintrust
Common stack mates teams adopt alongside Braintrust, with the specific reason each pairing earns its keep.
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