Six alternatives to Helicone compared on licence terms, self-hosted feature gating, datastore count and pricing, plus what maintenance mode actually covers.
Mintlify acquired Helicone in posts dated 3 March 2026, and Helicone's says its services will remain live for the foreseeable future in maintenance mode. Both companies define that as security updates, bug fixes and new models continuing to ship, so it constrains new feature work rather than ending the product. Commit volume matches: between 37 and 76 a month in the four months before the acquisition, and between 1 and 6 a month since April 2026. The repository is Apache-2.0 with no separately licensed enterprise directory, it is not archived, and its README mentions none of this, so it reads as a normally active project until you check the dates.
The real reasons are narrower
Supported on-prem deployment sits under the Enterprise tier, and SOC 2 and HIPAA compliance sit on Team at $799 per month, which is a large step from Pro at $79. And the product is observability: agent execution, isolated sandboxes and evaluation workflows are outside its scope.
Choose on licence gating and datastore count
Langfuse gates nine features behind an enterprise licence when self-hosting, including audit logs, retention policies and server-side data masking. Opik gates only user management but runs five datastores. OpenLIT runs one and has no paid tier at all. Laminar runs three with cloud and self-hosted parity. Those are the differences that are hard to change later.
