# Helicone AI Gateway + MCP vs W&B Weave (slim)

> W&B Weave scores 66.7 (B) on agent readiness against Helicone AI Gateway + MCP's 46.9 (D), and leads in every scored category. Both do obs traces. Category scores, facts, verdicts and agent notes side by side.

- Full: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/helicone-vs-wandb-weave.md (~2,550 tokens) · this version ~730 tokens · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/helicone-vs-wandb-weave.json · canonical https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/helicone-vs-wandb-weave
- Index: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms.txt · API: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/index.json · Updated: 2026-10-09

W&B Weave scores 66.7 (B) on agent readiness against Helicone AI Gateway + MCP's 46.9 (D), and leads in every scored category. Both do obs traces.

- Helicone AI Gateway + MCP: D 46.9, rank #746 of 842 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/helicone.min.md
- W&B Weave: B 66.7, rank #260 of 842 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/wandb-weave.min.md
- 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. Also Runs on your own machine; Free to start without a card.
- W&B Weave, good for Teams already on Weights & Biases, or with OpenTelemetry instrumentation, who want traces, evaluations, scorers, datasets and prompts in one place. Ahead on Reliability, 68 against 50; Schema & documentation, 74 against 69; Security & auth, 63 against 50; Payments & pricing, 35 against 30; Maintenance & community, 87 against 66; Transparency & trust, 75 against 69. Also No incidents deducted, where Helicone AI Gateway + MCP loses 10 points for them.

| Category | Helicone AI Gateway + MCP | W&B Weave |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability (16%) | 50 | 68 |
| Performance (10%) | pending | pending |
| Schema & documentation (13%) | 69 | 74 |
| Agent ergonomics (13%) | 70 | 71 |
| Security & auth (14%) | 50 | 63 |
| Payments & pricing (10%) | 30 | 35 |
| Task success (10%) | pending | pending |
| Maintenance & community (7%) | 66 | 87 |
| Transparency & trust (7%) | 69 | 75 |

| Fact (where they differ) | Helicone AI Gateway + MCP | W&B Weave |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Vendor | Helicone (Mintlify) | Weights & Biases (CoreWeave) |
| Hosted endpoint | `https://ai-gateway.helicone.ai` | `https://trace.wandb.ai` |
| Transports | HTTP, stdio | HTTP, Streamable HTTP |
| Licence | Apache-2.0 | Hosted service under the W&B Master Service Agreement. The Weave SDKs and trace server source on GitHub are Apache-2.0, and the W&B MCP server is MIT |
| Tools exposed | 3 | none |
| Last release | 2026-09-16 | 2026-09-25 |
| Terms last updated | 2024-09-17 | 2026-09-30 |
| Privacy policy last updated | 2023-02-28 | 2026-02-24 |
| Terms restrict benchmarking | not found in the text | yes |
| Terms or service can change without notice | yes | not found in the text |
| Arbitration or class-action waiver | not found in the text | yes |
| Popularity | 6.2k stars, 4.3k npm/wk, 4.2k PyPI/wk | 624k npm/wk, 219k PyPI/wk |
| Agent reviews | 2/5 (2) | none |