Braintrust vs Langfuse
Braintrust and Langfuse both evaluate your agent well. Neither shows your customer what it did.
Braintrust is a closed, end-to-end AI development platform built around its own Brainstore storage engine, with one-click eval case creation from production traces, a unified workspace for engineers and product teammates, and a built-in AI gateway. Langfuse is the open source, self-hostable alternative: MIT licensed, framework-agnostic through OpenTelemetry, and priced by the unit rather than the gigabyte. Both exist to do the same underlying job: evaluate and trace an agent for the people who built it. This page verifies what each one actually costs against its own current pricing page and covers the one comparison point every other Braintrust vs Langfuse writeup skips, what happens once a real customer asks what the agent did for their account.
Two tools, one job
What Braintrust and Langfuse actually do, before the pricing gets involved
Braintrust is a proprietary, end-to-end AI development platform built around Brainstore, its own Rust storage engine layered on object storage. Past logging production traces and rendering thread-level views, it turns those traces into eval cases in one click rather than a manual export, runs experiment baselines and repeated trials, and adds a Loop AI agent that Braintrust describes as analyzing traces directly to surface regressions. It also ships an AI gateway and unified workspace where engineers and non-technical product teammates share the same dashboards, so evaluation isn't siloed to one team. Every one of those features works the same way whether you're on Braintrust Cloud or its custom-priced Enterprise on-prem option, though on-prem itself only exists at that top tier.
Langfuse is an open source LLM engineering platform, MIT licensed, built on ClickHouse for storage, that traces every step an agent takes, then layers dataset-based evaluation on top: LLM-as-judge scoring, code evaluators, and reusable evaluators applied through rules you can inspect and version. It integrates through OpenTelemetry across more than a hundred frameworks rather than favoring one, and bills usage as a single unit, a combined count of traces, observations, and scores. Where Braintrust keeps self-hosting behind its Enterprise tier, Langfuse treats full-stack self-hosting as a first-class, MIT-licensed option at every tier, including organization-level role-based access control and SSO on the free Open Source tier, the detail that draws teams to it in the first place.
Where they actually differ, tier by tier
Self-hosting, pricing, and evaluation approach: the four places Braintrust and Langfuse split
Every figure below comes from each vendor's own pricing page, checked again the day this page was published.
Self-hosting and licensing
Langfuse's Open Source self-hosted tier is genuinely free under an MIT license, with no usage cap and organization-level RBAC and SSO included at no extra charge. Braintrust keeps on-premises and hosted deployment behind its custom-priced Enterprise tier only, with no free or self-managed option below it, since only its SDKs and autoevals are open source rather than the platform itself.
Pricing, checked live
Braintrust: Starter free with ten dollars of credits, one gigabyte of processed data then four dollars per gigabyte, ten thousand scores then two dollars fifty per thousand, fourteen-day retention. Pro two hundred and forty nine dollars with a hundred dollars of credits, five gigabytes then three dollars per gigabyte, fifty thousand scores then a dollar fifty per thousand, thirty-day retention. Enterprise custom. Langfuse: Hobby free for fifty thousand units a month, Core twenty nine dollars for a hundred thousand units, Pro a hundred and ninety nine dollars with the same allowance plus SOC 2 and ISO 27001 reports, Enterprise at twenty five hundred dollars.
Evaluation approach
Braintrust automates eval case creation from production traces in one click and adds a Loop AI agent for surfacing regressions, plus experiment baselines and repeated trials. Langfuse runs LLM-as-judge scoring, code evaluators, and reusable evaluators through rules you configure and version yourself, more setup work in exchange for full visibility into how every score gets computed.
Compliance, tier by tier
Langfuse's Pro tier, one hundred and ninety nine dollars a month, already includes SOC 2 and ISO 27001 reports with a HIPAA BAA available on request. Braintrust's Pro tier, two hundred and forty nine dollars a month, adds SOC 2 Type II and SAML SSO but keeps its BAA and full data processing agreement behind the custom-priced Enterprise tier only.
What neither one answers
Both evaluate the agent for your team. Neither shows it to the customer paying for it.
Every comparison of Braintrust and Langfuse, including the ones each vendor publishes about the other, frames the decision the same way: which tool helps your own engineers trace, score, and debug an agent faster and cheaper. Braintrust's own comparison page runs through core feature parity and a workflow walkthrough favoring its own automation. Langfuse's own comparison page runs through open source licensing, storage architecture, and a worked pricing example from the other direction. Third-party writeups add a second layer, GitHub stars, migration paths, and pricing calculators on top. Not one of them, vendor or independent, raises the question of whether anyone outside your company should ever see any of it.
If you sell an AI agent inside a product other companies pay for, that question becomes the second problem the moment the first one gets solved. A customer deciding whether to renew wants their own deflection rate and cost per resolution, scoped to their own traffic and nobody else's, and neither Braintrust nor Langfuse was built with a second tenant in mind at all. AiAgRe's Node SDK reads the same kind of trace data either tool already produces, through the same LangChain, LlamaIndex, or CrewAI integrations, and tags each event with an organization identity and a customer identity at the point of ingestion. That turns into white-labeled dashboard components your customer sees inside your own product, scoped so tightly that one customer's numbers never reach another's view. It doesn't replace the pre-launch evaluation work either tool does well; most teams keep one of them running for that job and add AiAgRe for what happens after the agent is live and a real customer is watching.
The full pricing breakdown for Langfuse, reconciled meter by meter against its own worked examples, lives on the Langfuse pricing page. A wider look at where both fit against Arize, Portkey, and Galileo AI in the same category sits on the Langfuse alternatives page.
FAQs
Braintrust vs Langfuse: frequently asked questions
Common questions from teams pricing the two against each other before they commit to a tier, or before they add a second layer on top.
Is Braintrust actually more expensive than Langfuse?
On the numbers Langfuse itself publishes, yes, once real traffic shows up. Langfuse's own worked example, five hundred thousand traces a month, puts its Pro plan at roughly six hundred and twenty one dollars a month against roughly eleven hundred and twenty two dollars a month for Braintrust's Pro plan on the same workload. That comparison is worth reading carefully rather than taking at face value, since it comes from Langfuse's own page and the two tools don't meter the same thing: Langfuse bills a single unit for any trace, observation, or score, while Braintrust bills processed data by the gigabyte plus scores per thousand on top of a fixed monthly credit. Run the math against your own actual data volume and score count before assuming the ratio holds for your workload too.
Can I self-host Braintrust for free the way I can with Langfuse?
No. Braintrust's own pricing page keeps on-premises and hosted deployment options behind its custom-priced Enterprise tier only, with nothing free or self-managed on the Starter or Pro tiers below it. Langfuse's Open Source self-hosted tier, by contrast, runs under an MIT license with no usage cap and organization-level role-based access control included at no charge, features Braintrust doesn't offer below Enterprise at all. What Langfuse's free self-hosted tier leaves out is server-side data masking, project-level access control, configurable retention policies, and audit logs, all of which sit behind a separate paid Self-Hosted Enterprise tier that Langfuse also prices only through a sales conversation.
Does Braintrust's automatic eval case creation replace what Langfuse does?
Not exactly; the two take different approaches to the same problem. Braintrust's own comparison page describes turning production traces into eval cases as a one-click, largely automated step, alongside a Loop AI agent it says analyzes traces directly. Langfuse's evaluation stack runs on LLM-as-judge scoring, code evaluators, and reusable evaluators applied through rules, which takes more manual setup but keeps the scoring logic fully visible and versioned rather than handled inside a proprietary agent. Neither vendor's own page discloses a head-to-head accuracy number between the two approaches, so treat the automation claim as a real time-saver worth testing against your own traces rather than a settled result.
Which one gets me SOC 2 and HIPAA compliance without going to Enterprise?
Langfuse, at a lower price point. Its Pro tier, one hundred and ninety nine dollars a month, already includes SOC 2 and ISO 27001 reports with a HIPAA BAA available on request. Braintrust's Pro tier, two hundred and forty nine dollars a month, adds SOC 2 Type II and SAML SSO, but keeps its BAA and full data processing agreement behind the custom-priced Enterprise tier only. If HIPAA coverage is a hard requirement and Enterprise budget isn't on the table yet, that gap alone is worth weighing before anything else on either pricing page.
Do either of them let my own customers see their own numbers?
Neither one does, and that isn't a tier they're holding back for a higher plan. Braintrust and Langfuse both render every trace, score, and dashboard inside a workspace scoped to the account that pays the bill, built for the engineers who run the evaluations. Neither has a concept of a second tenant, a customer sitting outside your company who should see a dashboard scoped to only their own traffic. AiAgRe covers that specific job: a Node SDK that reads the same kind of agent events either tool already traces, tags them with an organization identity and a customer identity at ingestion, and turns that into white-labeled dashboard components your own customer sees inside your product.
Can I run AiAgRe alongside Braintrust or Langfuse?
Yes, and that's the normal setup rather than a workaround. AiAgRe's SDK taps the same underlying agent events either tool already reads through the same LangChain, LlamaIndex, or CrewAI integrations, and tagging each event with a customer identity at ingestion doesn't touch how Braintrust or Langfuse evaluates the same run or bills for it. Most teams keep whichever evaluation tool they've already picked for internal testing, then add AiAgRe on top for the dashboard their own paying customer actually sees.
So should I pick Braintrust, Langfuse, or both?
Pick Braintrust if a unified workspace for engineers and non-technical teammates, automated eval case creation, and a built-in AI gateway matter more than self-hosting, and your team is comfortable with sales-gated pricing once you need HIPAA or on-prem. Pick Langfuse if self-hosting, unit-based pricing, and full visibility into how every score gets computed matter more than a turnkey automation layer, and lower-tier compliance coverage fits your budget at your actual trace volume. Plenty of teams run both for different projects, and neither choice changes whether your own customer can see what the agent did for their account, which is a separate decision covered on the Langfuse pricing page and the multi-tenant analytics page.
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