Helicone Alternative with Active PII Redaction & Governance

What Helicone Does Well

Helicone is a well-built observability platform with a developer-friendly integration model. Credit where it's due:

Where Observability Alone Falls Short

Helicone is designed to watch and measure — not to intervene. When production AI systems handle real customer data and face real cost pressure, that gap becomes material:

The AI Security Gateway Approach: Active Governance

AI Security Gateway does not just log what happened — it actively intervenes in every request before it reaches any provider. The full pipeline runs automatically:

Feature Comparison

Side-by-side comparison of observability, security, and governance capabilities. Green indicates full support, amber indicates partial or limited support, red indicates the feature is not available.

“Omit Logs” Is Not PII Redaction

Helicone offers Helicone-Omit-Request and Helicone-Omit-Response headers to exclude request/response bodies from their log storage. This protects your observability layer from storing PII — but the PII still travels to the LLM provider. These are fundamentally different operations:

Use Both Together

AISG and Helicone solve different problems. For teams that want both active governance and deep observability, you can chain them:

import OpenAI from "openai";

// Point your app at AISG for governance
const client = new OpenAI({
  apiKey: "os_hub_your_key_here",
  baseURL: "https://api.aisecuritygateway.ai/v1",
});

// AISG scans, redacts, and enforces budget.
// Helicone can be added downstream for cost analytics.
// The prompt Helicone logs is already clean — PII is gone.

This gives you the best of both worlds: AISG handles security (PII redaction, injection blocking, budget enforcement) and Helicone handles observability (cost analytics, session tracing, caching). Helicone only ever sees the cleaned data.

Migrate from Helicone

If you are already using Helicone as a proxy, switching to AISG requires changing the base URL and API key:

import OpenAI from "openai";

const client = new OpenAI({
  apiKey: "sk-xxxxx",
  baseURL: "https://oai.helicone.ai/v1",
  defaultHeaders: {
    "Helicone-Auth": "Bearer your-helicone-key",
  },
});

import OpenAI from "openai";

const client = new OpenAI({
  apiKey: "os_hub_your_key_here",
  baseURL: "https://api.aisecuritygateway.ai/v1",
});

// PII redaction, vision OCR, prompt injection blocking,
// and budget enforcement are active immediately.
// No headers needed. No configuration required.

When to Use Each

Add Active Governance to Your AI Stack

Create an account, get your API key, and every request is automatically scanned, redacted, and budget-checked. No configuration. No third-party integrations. Protection from the first API call.