Teams look for a Langfuse alternative when the unit meter, the retention window or the ownership change prompts a second look. Some want a European vendor, some want a different billing unit such as spans, gigabytes or seats, and others want tracing folded into a gateway, a monitoring suite or an evaluation tool they already use.
Short answer: The first three alternatives to Langfuse in our LLM observability tool ranking are LangWatch, Laminar and Opik. The first three places are kept for challengers when the category has enough of them; the best-known brands come after that, in ranked order. Choose LangWatch if you want a European vendor and code you can host under Apache-2.0. Every one of the 11 products below comes from Best LLM Observability Tools in 2026, with a note on how it departs from Langfuse.
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Pricing: Free Hobby plan; monthly tiers with per-unit overage; prices published
Established in: United States
Built for: Teams that want the option to move from hosted to their own infrastructure
Not for: Buyers who want a flat price with no per-unit overage
01
Why buyers look past Langfuse
01
Billing counts units, and tiers jump
Langfuse includes 50,000 units on Hobby and 100,000 on each paid plan, then charges $8 per 100,000 on the pricing page, with lower rates by volume. Core costs $29 a month and Pro $199, so a team that needs three years of history pays about seven times as much before any overage.
02
Short history on the lower tiers
Hobby keeps data accessible for 30 days with two users, and Core for 90 days. Three-year access, retention management, unlimited annotation queues and the SOC 2 and ISO 27001 reports start at Pro. Teams that compare behaviour across quarters meet this limit first.
03
Ownership and licence questions
Langfuse is part of ClickHouse, Inc. and its pages list US, EU (Ireland) and Japan cloud regions. The core is MIT-licensed, yet add-on features in self-hosted setups need a licence key, and a production deployment means running Postgres, ClickHouse, Redis and object storage yourself.
your platform team already pays for Datadog and wants one tool
#12
03
What each one does differently
1
LangWatch
Netherlands · Published
Amsterdam-based Reasoning Engine B.V. publishes LangWatch under Apache-2.0 and prices in euros, with a monthly fee per core seat. Events beyond the 200,000 included are billed per 100,000. Free Developer data stays reachable for 14 days and Growth for 30, so long-range comparisons need extra storage, billed per gigabyte.
Switch from Langfuse if you want a European vendor and code you can host under Apache-2.0.
Laminar replaces unit counting with stored volume: the free plan holds 1 GB for 7 days, while Starter and Pro include 3 GB and 10 GB with gigabyte overage. Paid plans carry unlimited seats and projects. Its Signals feature bills the tokens of its own analysis agent, which is a second meter next to the plan fee.
Switch from Langfuse if your bill should follow gigabytes stored rather than units or seats.
Comet's Opik ships its whole platform, backend included, under Apache-2.0, so self-hosting involves no licence key. Hosted plans count spans instead of units: 25,000 a month free and 100,000 on Pro, each with 60-day retention. Pro is a flat monthly price for up to 50 members; SSO and certifications sit in Enterprise.
Switch from Langfuse if you self-host and want every feature under a single permissive licence.
Phoenix carries the Elastic License 2.0, which lets you run it internally but prevents reselling it as a managed service. Arize's hosted AX cloud has a free tier of 25,000 spans a month with 15-day retention, and Pro adds 50,000 spans for a monthly fee. Self-hosted AX is an Enterprise deployment.
Switch from Langfuse if you only need to run tracing for your own team and can accept a source-available licence.
The Developer plan covers five users and 10,000 events a month, keeps data 30 days and caps ingestion at 1,000 requests per minute. Beyond it, the page publishes no amounts, only Enterprise features such as SAML, a BAA, unlimited users and self-hosted, hybrid or single-tenant deployment.
Switch from Langfuse if a small trial with online evaluation matters and you will negotiate production terms.
Logfire puts agents, services and hosts on one OpenTelemetry timeline and meters telemetry records, not units. Free allows 10 million records a month with a hard cap, so a bill cannot grow past it. Team adds five seats and a charge per extra million. Running the platform yourself is an Enterprise option.
Switch from Langfuse if your LLM traces should sit beside ordinary service logs and metrics.
Braintrust is organised around experiments and scoring. Beyond the platform fee it meters processed data, scored outputs and model credits. Starter covers 1 GB with 14-day retention; Pro costs $249 a month with 5 GB and 30 days. Users and projects are unlimited, and on-premises deployment belongs to Enterprise.
Switch from Langfuse if evaluation of outputs is your main workflow and seat limits annoy you.
Lunary charges per user each month, with 50,000 events, a ten-seat limit and a year of history on its Team plan. Its pricing page says payment comes before a new workspace opens, and existing free workspaces keep their plan. Self-hosting, SSO, PII masking and an SLA need Enterprise. The vendor names no country.
Switch from Langfuse if you want per-user pricing and a year of history in one plan.
Portkey starts as an AI gateway: routing, fallbacks, caching and guardrails come with request logs. The free Developer plan records 10,000 logs a month for 3 days and the page calls it unsuitable for production. Production includes 100,000 requests, then a per-100,000 overage up to 3 million.
Switch from Langfuse if you also want routing and fallbacks in front of your model providers.
LangSmith joins a per-seat fee to metered traces. Developer gives one seat and 5,000 base traces a month, Plus adds seats with 10,000 base traces, and extra usage is billed in LangChain Standard Units. Hybrid and self-hosted deployment are Enterprise options, and a usage calculator exists because volume moves the bill.
Switch from Langfuse if your application is built on LangChain and LangGraph.
Datadog documents its product as Agent Observability and bills each LLM span ingested, added to a Datadog contract. A single agent workflow can emit several spans, so cost follows workflow depth. It sits beside infrastructure and application monitoring, and the docs list an EU site among regions.
Switch from Langfuse if your platform team already pays for Datadog and wants one tool.
LangWatch: It is run by Reasoning Engine B.V. in Amsterdam, with Apache-2.0 code and 200,000 events included per plan before overage.
02
You want to host everything under one permissive licence
Opik: The full platform, backend included, is Apache-2.0, and hosted plans start free at 25,000 spans a month.
03
You want a spending ceiling you can rely on
Pydantic Logfire: The free plan allows 10 million records a month with a hard cap, so the bill cannot grow.
04
You already build on LangChain or LangGraph
LangSmith: It combines a per-seat fee with metered traces, starting from a free Developer seat with 5,000 base traces.
05
You want to pay by storage rather than by event
Laminar: Plans are sized in gigabytes, from 1 GB free for 7 days to 10 GB on Pro, with unlimited seats.
04
When Langfuse is still the right choice
Langfuse remains a sound choice when you want tracing, prompt versioning, evaluation and datasets in one product with a free tier to start on. The MIT core and Docker or Helm deployments suit teams that must keep traces in their own network, and the cloud offers an EU region. If volume stays near 100,000 units a month, Core at $29 is hard to beat on price alone.
05
What moving off Langfuse involves
01
Trace history stays behind
Export what you need through the batch export or the API before cancelling, since access is limited to 30, 90 days or three years by plan. Scores, datasets and annotations carry the most judgement, so check each against the destination's import format.
02
Prompts and instrumentation need a second look
Prompt versions fetched through the Langfuse SDK must be recreated or kept in your repository. If your code uses the Langfuse SDKs, a switch to OpenTelemetry-based tracing keeps the instrumentation portable across several of the tools below. Run both for a week to compare counts.
06
Questions about replacing Langfuse
6 answers
What does Langfuse cost per month?
The pricing page lists Hobby free, Core at $29, Pro at $199 and Enterprise at $2,499 a month. Hobby includes 50,000 units, the paid plans 100,000, and extra usage costs $8 per 100,000 units, lowered by volume.
Is Langfuse open source and can I self-host it?
The core is MIT-licensed and the documentation describes Docker Compose, Kubernetes with Helm and Terraform for AWS, Azure and GCP. Some add-on features require a licence key, and production needs PostgreSQL, ClickHouse, Redis or Valkey and object storage.
Which alternatives can I run myself?
Opik is Apache-2.0 including the backend, and LangWatch and Laminar publish Apache-2.0 code too. Phoenix uses the Elastic License 2.0, which bars offering it as a managed service. Logfire, Lunary, HoneyHive and LangSmith place self-hosting in Enterprise.
Which alternative has a European company behind it?
LangWatch is operated by Reasoning Engine B.V. in Amsterdam and prices in euros. Langfuse and most others here are US companies, though Langfuse offers an EU cloud region in Ireland and Datadog lists an EU site.
Which alternative has a hard spending cap?
Pydantic Logfire's free plan stops at 10 million records a month, so the bill cannot grow. Other free plans publish limits too, such as Opik's 25,000 spans or Arize's 25,000 spans, but check what happens when you exceed them.
Does Langfuse still work after the ClickHouse acquisition?
Langfuse states that the roadmap and self-hosting continue, and its security pages now list ClickHouse contact addresses and its trust centre. Nothing we read says the product is ending, but ownership is a reason to review your exit options.
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Sources
Checked 10 November 2026
Langfuse pricing: Hobby, Core $29, Pro $199, Enterprise $2,499, units included, $8 per 100k, data access 30 days, 90 days, 3 years.
Founder of The Knowledge Engineers and of 2 Steps Ahead, an AI search visibility agency. Editorially responsible for every page on this site; research and drafting are AI-assisted.
Checked and edited by Sebastiaan Smits, last on 10 November 2026. The editorial process explains the method.
