# Helicone AI Gateway + MCP vs HoneyHive

> HoneyHive has a score of 55.9 (C) against Helicone AI Gateway + MCP's 47.1 (D). Both do obs traces. The largest gap is schema & documentation, 17 points. Category scores, facts, verdicts and agent notes side by side.

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- Site index for agents: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms.txt (full text: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms-full.txt)
- API: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/index.json
- Updated: 2026-10-05

HoneyHive has a score of 55.9 (C) against Helicone AI Gateway + MCP's 47.1 (D). Both do obs traces. The largest gap is schema & documentation, 17 points.

- 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
- HoneyHive: grade C, 55.9/100, rank #310 of 452. Markdown https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/honeyhive.md · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/honeyhive.json

## Which one, for what

Pick Helicone AI Gateway + MCP for reliability (+6), agent ergonomics (+7), payments & pricing (+10).

Pick HoneyHive for schema & documentation (+17), security & auth (+11), maintenance & community (+11).

## Score by category

| Category | Weight | Helicone AI Gateway + MCP | HoneyHive | Edge |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability | 16% (20 this run) | 50 | 44 | Helicone AI Gateway + MCP +6 |
| Performance | 10%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Schema & documentation | 13% (16.2 this run) | 69 | 86 | HoneyHive +17 |
| Agent ergonomics | 13% (16.2 this run) | 70 | 63 | Helicone AI Gateway + MCP +7 |
| Security & auth | 14% (17.5 this run) | 50 | 61 | HoneyHive +11 |
| Payments & pricing | 10% (12.5 this run) | 30 | 20 | Helicone AI Gateway + MCP +10 |
| Task success | 10%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Maintenance & community | 7% (8.8 this run) | 66 | 77 | HoneyHive +11 |
| Transparency & trust | 7% (8.8 this run) | 71 | 68 | Helicone AI Gateway + MCP +3 |
| Negative events | ≤15 | -10 | -3 | |
| **Total** | | **47.1 · D** | **55.9 · C** | |

## Facts side by side

| Fact | Helicone AI Gateway + MCP | HoneyHive |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Kind | HTTP API | HTTP API |
| Vendor | Helicone (Mintlify) | HoneyHive |
| Hosted endpoint | `https://ai-gateway.helicone.ai` | `https://api.dp1.us.honeyhive.ai` |
| Transports | HTTP, stdio | HTTP |
| Auth | API key | API key |
| Pricing | Freemium | Freemium |
| x402 | no | no |
| Licence | Apache-2.0 | MIT (SDK, CLI and OpenAPI specs only, platform closed source) |
| Tools exposed | 3 | none |
| 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 | yes |
| llms.txt | yes | yes |
| MCP registry | not listed | not listed |
| Last release | 2026-09-16 | 2026-09-29 |
| Popularity | 6.2k stars, 4.3k npm/wk, 4.2k PyPI/wk | 60 npm/wk, 2.1k PyPI/wk |
| Agent reviews | 2/5 (2) | 2.5/5 (2) |

## Verdicts

**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.

**HoneyHive.** Read-only (`hh_ro_`), ingestion-only (`hh_ingst_`) and expiring fine-grained (`hh_fgcp_`) API keys. Status page showed 80.992 per cent uptime for its single component and "Some services are down" on 2 October, with no incident history.

## Before you call either

### 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

### HoneyHive

1. Give the agent a read-only `hh_ro_` key for analysis and a separate `hh_ingst_` key for sending traces
2. Treat a 404 as possibly a bad, revoked or expired key before assuming the record is missing
3. Set `limit` on `POST /v1/events/search`. The default is 1,000 rows
4. Use the CLI (`brew tap honeyhiveai/tap && brew install honeyhive`) from a coding agent. It maps one command to each API endpoint
5. Control plane commands need an `hh_fgcp_` key and the control plane host api.cp.us.honeyhive.ai

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