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Tracelane is Apache 2.0 across the entire stack — gateway, ingest, SDKs and self-host. If licensing matters to your review, read each project’s LICENSE file and take your own counsel’s view: Tracelane’s is Apache-2.0, and Helicone’s ai-gateway carries a GPL-3.0 LICENSE.

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How we compare

A — in the Helicone column means we found no such capability documented in Helicone’s public docs when this page was last reviewed — not that it does not exist. Check Helicone’s documentation for their current surface.

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Migration

This scans your .env* files and SDK call sites, then rewrites the Helicone base URL and auth headers (Helicone-Auth) to their Tracelane equivalents — a config + environment migration, shown as a diff before writing. It does not import historical trace data. Most teams cut over the same afternoon; new traces flow from the moment you redeploy.

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FAQ

No. Tracelane’s gateway is original work under Apache 2.0, and we take no Helicone package as a dependency.You do not have to take that on trust. Our deny.toml sets a license allowlist for the whole Rust dependency tree, and GPL/AGPL are denied by omission from it — a copyleft crate cannot enter the build without the cargo-deny (bans + licenses + advisories) CI job failing. Every third-party dependency and its license is also enumerated in the CycloneDX SBOM published with each release, so you can audit the tree yourself.
Tracelane covers 205 providers, BYOK with envelope encryption, usage/token tracking, OTel GenAI semconv, and a full Apache 2.0 self-host. On top of that it ships a tamper-evident audit ledger you can verify offline (self-host writes and hashes the chain to ClickHouse; chain resumption ACROSS a gateway restart needs the Postgres control plane, so continuous multi-restart chains are Cloud today), inline heuristic guardrails, and a Prompt Promotion workflow. Compare that surface against your current tool’s own documentation — feature parity is a moving target and we would rather you check than trust our summary of someone else’s product.
tlane import-helicone --traces <path> imports historical requests from a saved Helicone JSON file. It reads a local file and does not fetch or paginate your Helicone account. See Import Helicone history for the accepted format and limits. New traces flow into Tracelane after you route traffic through the gateway.
Verified as of 2026-08-26 against each vendor’s public documentation and public repositories. A — means we found no such capability documented at that date — not that the vendor lacks it. Vendors change their products; if anything here is inaccurate or out of date, please open an issue and we will correct it.