Prova vs Helicone
Helicone tells you what happened. Prova decides what gets to happen, signs the record, and hands the regulator the verifiable trail.
BOOK A CALLHelicone is an LLM proxy and observability tool. It logs requests, computes cost, and surfaces dashboards. Prova is the AI control plane. It runs the same observation pipeline AND enforces policies at the gateway, signs every receipt with Ed25519, auto-rolls-back a regressing deploy, and ships a verifiable audit trail any auditor can validate offline.
| Feature | Prova | Helicone |
|---|---|---|
| Cost dashboards | Yes | Yes |
| Per-agent attribution in multi-agent systems | Yes | No |
| Gateway-side hard enforcement (block before model call) | Yes | No |
| Monthly budget cap that blocks (not just alerts) | Yes | No |
| Runtime autonomy boundaries (allowed_tools, max_steps, scopes) | Yes | No |
| Ed25519-signed receipts, verifiable offline | Yes | No |
| Auto-rollback on a signed regression | Yes | No |
| Cross-customer fleet benchmark | Yes | No |
| EU AI Act / FDA / SEC / HIPAA evidence export | Yes | No |
| Open source observation core | No | Yes |
Where Prova is different
Enforce, do not just observe
Helicone alerts when cost is high. Prova returns action=block at the gateway when the call would push you over your monthly cap. The signed receipt of the block is the auditable record. Observability tells you the bill arrived; the control plane stops it from arriving.
Per-agent, not per-key
In a multi-agent system, per-key attribution hides which agent is burning the budget. Prova ties cost to source.app_id and source.framework. Your dashboard says "the reviewer agent in claims-orchestrator is your top spender," not "key prv_abc... used $4k."
The signed receipt is the moat
Helicone can copy any chart in a sprint. Nobody can copy a signed, verifiable audit trail without re-architecting from the data model up. The receipt format is open and verifiable offline against a published public key.
Use Helicone if observation is the whole job. Use Prova if you need to enforce, sign, and audit AI decisions for a regulator. The two work together; Prova replaces the parts of Helicone that matter for governance.