Helicone AI Gateway + MCP vs Navige

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.

Navige

Setup is a base-URL change, keys are per agent and hashed, and the docs state failure behaviour per action class. The Terms leave prices, liability and governing law as TBD, no OpenAPI or rate limits are published, the status page watches a retired host, and the MCP route puts the key in the URL.

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

Navige

1. Send the Navige key in x-navige-key on the proxy. Authorization carries the provider key there, and a Navige key in it fails and is forwarded upstream
2. Act only on allow or approved from /enforce. Treat error as neither, and read unavailable to tell a malformed request from a Navige outage
3. Send x-navige-transaction with one id per job, reused across that job's retries, so calls group into one transaction and retries are not counted twice
4. On a 429 from the proxy, check for a blocking budget before retrying. Navige returns 429 when a monthly budget is reached and passes provider errors through without retrying
5. Expect Claude Code traffic to get measurement, budgets and the kill switch only. Context trimming, routing, the output ceiling and prompt caching are switched off for it