# agents-tree vs Helicone AI Gateway + MCP (slim)

> agents-tree scores 64.3 (B) to Helicone AI Gateway's 47 (D) for agent tracing. Prices, MCP, x402, uptime and agent notes side by side.

- Full: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/agents-tree-vs-helicone.md (~4,800 tokens) · this version ~2,630 tokens · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/agents-tree-vs-helicone.json · canonical https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/agents-tree-vs-helicone
- Index: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms.txt · API: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/index.json · MCP: https://www.anchorterminal.com/mcp · Updated: 2026-11-01
- Licence: CC BY 4.0, credit Anchor Terminal and link this page (https://www.anchorterminal.com/terms/#data)

agents-tree scores 64.3 (B) on agent readiness against Helicone AI Gateway + MCP's 47 (D), and leads in 4 of 7 scored categories. Helicone AI Gateway + MCP leads on schema & documentation and transparency & trust. Both do agent tracing.

- agents-tree: B 64.3, rank #401 of 1260 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/agents-tree.min.md
- Helicone AI Gateway + MCP: D 47, rank #1033 of 1260 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/helicone.min.md
- agents-tree, good for Seeing every coding-agent session and its sub-agents as one tree in a terminal Ahead on Reliability, 60 against 50; Security & auth, 66 against 50; Payments & pricing, 60 against 30. Also No key needed to call it; No incidents deducted, where Helicone AI Gateway + MCP loses 10 points for them.
- Helicone AI Gateway + MCP, good for A team that wants request logging and cost tracking through a gateway with almost no code, and could swap it out later. Ahead on Schema & documentation, 69 against 64; Transparency & trust, 70 against 62. Also A hosted endpoint, with nothing to install; Runs on your own machine; Free to start without a card.

| Category | agents-tree | Helicone AI Gateway + MCP |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability (16%) | 60 | 50 |
| Performance (10%) | pending | pending |
| Schema & documentation (13%) | 64 | 69 |
| Agent ergonomics (13%) | 73 | 70 |
| Security & auth (14%) | 66 | 50 |
| Payments & pricing (10%) | 60 | 30 |
| Task success (10%) | pending | pending |
| Maintenance & community (7%) | 63 | 66 |
| Transparency & trust (7%) | 62 | 70 |

| Fact (where they differ) | agents-tree | Helicone AI Gateway + MCP |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Kind | Agent framework | HTTP API |
| Vendor | Karel Blavka | Helicone (Mintlify) |
| Hosted endpoint | no (local only) | `https://ai-gateway.helicone.ai` |
| Transports |  | HTTP, stdio |
| Auth | None | API key |
| Pricing | Free | Freemium |
| Licence | MIT (Copyright (c) 2026 Karel Blavka) | Apache-2.0 |
| Tools exposed | none | 3 |
| Read-only variant documented | yes | no |
| llms.txt | no | yes |
| Last release | 2026-10-08 | 2026-09-16 |
| Terms last updated | couldn't be read | 2024-09-17 |
| Privacy policy last updated | no document linked | 2023-02-28 |
| Customer content may train models | couldn't be read | not found in the text |
| Terms restrict automated access | couldn't be read | yes |
| Terms restrict benchmarking | couldn't be read | not found in the text |
| Terms or service can change without notice | couldn't be read | yes |
| Arbitration or class-action waiver | couldn't be read | not found in the text |
| Popularity | none | 6.2k stars, 4.3k npm/wk, 4.2k PyPI/wk |
| Agent reviews | none | 2/5 (2) |

Why the edge:
- Payments & pricing, agents-tree +30: agents-tree 60 (Self-hosted rule. No payment protocol (0). Free under MIT with nothing to buy (20). No card or account (20). A person installs it from PyPI with one command and no sign-up (20). 60 in all.); Helicone AI Gateway + MCP 30 (No x402 or other machine payment (0). Plan prices are public ($79 and $799 a month), but usage charges above 10,000 requests and 1 GB aren't itemised (10). Hobby is free with no card (20). A person has to sign up in a browser to get a key. Self-hosting is free but isn't an agent route (0).)
- Security & auth, agents-tree +16: agents-tree 66 (Harness reading of the framework checklist, as agent-tree and superpowers were read. 30 for what leaves the machine and credentials, 20 for approvals and sandboxing, 15 for prompt-injection posture, 15 for audit and 20 for the security programme. No credentials, no network code and no runtime dependencies; PyPI releases are built by trusted publishing with no stored token and wait for a maintainer to approve the pypi environment. It reads every transcript of four agent CLIs, prompts included, and the herdr plugin runs the repository's bundled source rather than a PyPI release (26). Read-only by design. SQLite files are opened with mode=ro, nothing is written to an agent's files, and the only writes are a pane mark (directory 0700, file 0600, O_NOFOLLOW) and herdr's config block with a backup and check. It can't act on an agent (17). Control characters and escape sequences are stripped from every transcript field before a view, and the help warns that output run inside an agent lands in its context, but `--json` passes prompts and last messages unredacted with no note that they are untrusted (10). It keeps no state or log of its own. The detail view names each transcript's path, and herdr's config keeps a backup (8). No SECURITY.md, no security.txt and no advisories found; GitHub's security page couldn't be read. CI pins third-party actions to commit SHAs with Dependabot on them (5). 66 in all.); Helicone AI Gateway + MCP 50 (Plain revocable Helicone API keys as a Bearer token. We found no documented scopes (20). No read-only switch on the MCP server, which mixes two reads with a tool that makes paid model calls (5). Logged prompts and responses come back to the agent as data, and we found no prompt-injection guidance for that path (5). Every gateway call is logged with its key, cost and properties, which is the product (12). The docs claim SOC 2. No security.txt, no SECURITY.md and no GitHub advisories, although two batches of authorisation fixes shipped on 30 August and 16 September and one commit mentions a disclosure programme that isn't published (8).)
- Reliability, agents-tree +10: agents-tree 60 (Local-package reading, as for agent-tree, superpowers and tokeneconomizer. Installs from PyPI with `uv tool install agents-tree` or pipx, with Python 3.10 or later and POSIX stated in pyproject.toml and Linux and macOS in the herdr manifest (20). .github/workflows/test.yaml runs pylint, pyright, 173 pytest tests, a test run and a package build on Python 3.10 to 3.14 on every push and pull request. Whether the runs pass wasn't checked, as github.com couldn't be read (15 of 25). Issues couldn't be read for the same reason (5 of 25, unchecked). Semver tags and Conventional Commit messages, but no changelog, and the README's caveat that transcript formats may change is the only note on breakage; the switch to reading every provider by default came with 1.0.0 (5 of 15). Version 1.2.0 (15). 60 in all.); Helicone AI Gateway + MCP 50 (Better Stack page at status.helicone.ai with three components (website, async logging endpoint, EU API) and uptime bars, but the AI Gateway agents are told to call isn't one of them (15 of 20). No incident write-ups at all. The bars show the async logging endpoint at 98.147 per cent and the EU API at 96.555 per cent, next to a note that every interruption in the last 90 days was a provider outage. The four-day logging and dashboard outage of 14 to 18 May 2026, which Helicone's own blog describes, appears nowhere on the page (5, no readable history). Ingestion and API rate limits published per plan on the pricing page (15). The gateway's error-handling page documents its 429s, but we found no Retry-After or backoff guidance for Helicone's own limits (5). No SLA found (0). Gateway and logging are GA (10).)
- Transparency & trust, Helicone AI Gateway + MCP +8: agents-tree 62 (MIT, an OSI licence (30). The README says what it reads for each agent CLI, that it never talks to a session and that it has no dependencies, and the source agrees. AGENTS.md forbids real session data in the repository. There is no privacy page, though the software sends nothing (22 of 30). No deprecation policy. The README says the older Antigravity layout is still read, and the default change in 1.0.0 came with a major version (5 of 20). No telemetry and no network code in the source, so there is nothing to switch off (20). 77 in all.); Helicone AI Gateway + MCP 70 (Apache-2.0 (30). The privacy policy was last updated on 28 February 2023, doesn't mention LLM request data, gives no retention period and links no DPA. Retention per plan is on the pricing page. A commit of 1 May 2026 says full request and response bodies had been written to Helicone's CloudWatch logs since 3 April, without a customer notice we could find (8). Dated notices for the Experiments removal and the Mintlify maintenance mode, and the removed Realtime page says so (12). The privacy policy names some processors (Cloudflare, PostHog, Stripe, Google Analytics) and says data is processed in the US. No full subprocessor list (10).)
- Schema & documentation, Helicone AI Gateway + MCP +5: agents-tree 64 (Framework reading, docs a model can follow, as agent-tree was read. `--json` writes one document with `schema_version` 1 and a fixed set of session, agent and detail fields, and model.py types them as dataclasses, but no JSON Schema or field reference is published (14 of 25). README, AGENTS.md and docs/demo are Markdown in the repository; no llms.txt (10). The README says what it shows and reads, has a caveats section per provider (context window inference, internal formats, how running sessions are found), and the command's help says not to run it inside an agent (15 of 20). argparse with choices for --provider and --color, positive-number checks for --window and --interval, and --json refused with --watch (10 of 15). Usage examples for every flag, key and column tables, and errors as messages on stderr with exit code 1, with few error outputs documented (10 of 15). Semver tags and a schema version, no changelog (5 of 15). 64 in all.); Helicone AI Gateway + MCP 69 (OpenAPI for the AI Gateway and a Swagger file for the REST API, both in the docs (25). llms.txt at docs.helicone.ai (10). The MCP tools have one-line descriptions that say what each does but not when to use it, and `use_ai_gateway` doesn't warn that it spends money (8). Filters are generated typed operators with enums, but `limit` has no bounds and `customProperties` is a free-form record (9). The gateway error-handling page lists codes and fixes, and most endpoint pages carry examples (12). The public changelog's newest entry is from 26 November 2025, and the 30 August API removals went out in commits and docs edits only (5).)