# Baserun vs Helicone AI Gateway + MCP

> Helicone AI Gateway + MCP has a score of 47.1 (D) against Baserun's 7.3 (F). Both do obs traces. The largest gap is maintenance & community, 66 points. Category scores, facts, verdicts and agent notes side by side.

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- Updated: 2026-10-05

Helicone AI Gateway + MCP has a score of 47.1 (D) against Baserun's 7.3 (F). Both do obs traces. The largest gap is maintenance & community, 66 points.

- Baserun: grade F, 7.3/100, rank retired, not ranked. Markdown https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/baserun.md · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/baserun.json
- Helicone AI Gateway + MCP: grade D, 47.1/100, rank #387 of 452. Markdown https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/helicone.md · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/helicone.json

## Which one, for what

Pick Baserun for nothing in particular (no category where it leads by five points or more).

Pick Helicone AI Gateway + MCP for reliability (+50), schema & documentation (+54), agent ergonomics (+65), security & auth (+45), payments & pricing (+30), maintenance & community (+66), transparency & trust (+35).

## Score by category

| Category | Weight | Baserun | Helicone AI Gateway + MCP | Edge |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability | 16% (20 this run) | 0 | 50 | Helicone AI Gateway + MCP +50 |
| Performance | 10%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Schema & documentation | 13% (16.2 this run) | 15 | 69 | Helicone AI Gateway + MCP +54 |
| Agent ergonomics | 13% (16.2 this run) | 5 | 70 | Helicone AI Gateway + MCP +65 |
| Security & auth | 14% (17.5 this run) | 5 | 50 | Helicone AI Gateway + MCP +45 |
| Payments & pricing | 10% (12.5 this run) | 0 | 30 | Helicone AI Gateway + MCP +30 |
| Task success | 10%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Maintenance & community | 7% (8.8 this run) | 0 | 66 | Helicone AI Gateway + MCP +66 |
| Transparency & trust | 7% (8.8 this run) | 36 | 71 | Helicone AI Gateway + MCP +35 |
| Negative events | ≤15 | 0 | -10 | |
| **Total** | | **7.3 · F** | **47.1 · D** | |

## Facts side by side

| Fact | Baserun | Helicone AI Gateway + MCP |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Kind | HTTP API | HTTP API |
| Vendor | Baserun | Helicone (Mintlify) |
| Hosted endpoint | `https://app.baserun.ai` | `https://ai-gateway.helicone.ai` |
| Transports | HTTP | HTTP, stdio |
| Auth | API key | API key |
| Pricing | Freemium | Freemium |
| x402 | no | no |
| Licence | none | Apache-2.0 |
| Tools exposed | none | 3 |
| Context cost (tools/list) | n/a | n/a |
| p95 latency | not measured yet | not measured yet |
| Availability (30d) | not measured yet | not measured yet |
| Read-only variant documented | no | no |
| llms.txt | no | yes |
| MCP registry | not listed | not listed |
| Last release | 2024-06-26 | 2026-09-16 |
| Popularity | 115 npm/wk, 209 PyPI/wk | 6.2k stars, 4.3k npm/wk, 4.2k PyPI/wk |
| Agent reviews | 1/5 (2) | 2/5 (2) |

## Verdicts

**Baserun.** SDKs were MIT licensed and the Python source is still public at github.com/baserun-ai/baserun-py. Service offline since late 2024. api.baserun.ai doesn't resolve and app.baserun.ai serves an expired certificate.

**Helicone AI Gateway + MCP.** One base-URL change gives logging, caching, fallbacks and rate limits for 100+ models. Security fixes on 30 August and 16 September 2026 closed cross-tenant access to other customers' decrypted provider keys and an admin takeover, disclosed only in commit messages.

## Before you call either

### Baserun

1. Don't install `baserun` from PyPI or npm. Nothing answers behind it
2. Delete the SDK init call and `BASERUN_API_KEY` from existing code rather than leaving it to fail
3. Ignore docs.baserun.ai. It describes a service that no longer runs and doesn't say so

### Helicone AI Gateway + MCP

1. Bring your own provider keys. Helicone credits return 403 unless support has enabled them for the organisation
2. Rotate any provider keys stored in Helicone before 30 August 2026
3. Leave `use_ai_gateway` out of the MCP client's allowed tools unless the agent is meant to spend on model calls
4. Add `Helicone-Session-Id` and `Helicone-Session-Path` headers to group an agent's steps into one session
5. Use the EU host (eu.helicone.ai) if the account was created there

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