The short answer
Short answer, prices read on 22 October 2026: for a 3-person product team logging 100,000 traces a month, LangSmith Plus costs $567 a month ($117 in seats plus $450 for the traces past the first 10,000). Langfuse Cloud Core costs $29 to $115 for the same traffic, depending on how many spans and scores each trace carries, because Langfuse bills every data point and LangSmith bills the trace. Self-hosting Langfuse is free in licence and runs on one server that meets Langfuse’s own minimum of 4 cores and 16 GiB: Hostinger KVM 4 is $12.99 a month on its promotional price and $28.99 at renewal. That avoids $538.01 a month against LangSmith Plus at the renewal price, before the engineer time to run it.
| Option | How it bills | 3 seats, 100,000 traces a month |
|---|---|---|
| LangSmith Plus | $39 a seat, 10,000 base traces included, then $0.005 a trace | $567 |
| Langfuse Cloud Pro | $199 a month, 100k units included, then graduated | $285 at 12 units a trace |
| Langfuse Cloud Core | $29 a month, unlimited users, 100k units included | $29 at 1 unit a trace, $115 at 12 |
| Opik Pro Cloud | $19 a month, 100k spans, then $5 per 100k spans | $64 at 10 spans a trace |
| Self-hosted Langfuse on DigitalOcean Basic, 16 GiB / 8 vCPU | Licence $0, server flat | $96 |
| Self-hosted Langfuse on Hostinger KVM 4 Our pick | Licence $0, server flat, paid upfront for the term | $12.99 promotional, $28.99 at renewal |
Our pick means we earn a commission if you buy through our link. Hostinger is our pick for the server because its KVM 4 plan matches the 4 cores and 16 GiB that Langfuse’s Docker Compose guide asks for at $12.99 a month on the promotional price, against $96 for the DigitalOcean Basic droplet that meets it. That does not change any score: Hostinger scores 1.9 on our published rubric and LangSmith 3.0. This site runs on Hostinger’s web hosting, not on a VPS. See Hostinger VPS plans.
Why the same traffic gets two different bills
The two tools meter different things. LangSmith charges per seat and per base trace, and a trace is billed once however many steps it holds. Langfuse charges per unit, and its pricing page defines a unit as “any tracing data point you send to our platform”: the trace, every observation inside it (spans, events and generations) and every score. Langfuse has no seat charge on Core and above. So LangSmith’s bill grows with people and traffic, and Langfuse’s grows with traffic and trace depth.
| Units per trace | Langfuse Core, 100,000 traces | LangSmith Plus, 3 seats |
|---|---|---|
| 1 (trace only) | $29 | $567 |
| 3 | $45 | $567 |
| 12 (1 trace, 10 observations, 1 score) | $115 | $567 |
| 25 | $206 | $567 |
At 100,000 traces and 3 seats, Langfuse Core stays at or under LangSmith Plus’s $567 until a trace averages 76 units. Each extra person on LangSmith adds $39 a month, which Langfuse Core does not charge. If your agent runs long tool loops, count your observations per trace before you trust either number.
Is LangSmith free or paid?
Both. The Developer plan is $0 for 1 seat with up to 5,000 base traces a month, then pay as you go. Plus is $39 a seat a month with up to 10,000 base traces a month in total, then 0.005 LSU a trace, and LangChain prices an LSU at $1.00, so $5 per 1,000 extra traces. Seats are billed monthly and pro-rated, with “no credit for removed seats”. Paid cloud data sits in LangChain’s US or EU cloud.
The retention catch: base traces are kept 14 days. Longer retention means extended traces, which LangChain’s billing docs say “cost more than base traces”, with a SaaS maximum of 180 days since 14 September 2026. Neither the pricing page nor the billing docs we read publish the extended rate, so the $567 above is the 14-day bill. Self-hosted LangSmith is an add-on to the Enterprise plan only.
Langfuse Cloud plans in dollars
| Plan | Price | Included | Data access |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hobby | Free | 50k units a month, 2 users | 30 days |
| Core | $29 a month | 100k units, then $8 per 100k, unlimited users | 90 days |
| Pro | $199 a month | 100k units, then graduated | 3 years |
| Teams add-on | $300 a month | On top of a plan | n/a |
| Enterprise | $2,499 a month | Enterprise support and security | 3 years |
Two terms are easy to misread. Data access (30 days, 90 days or 3 years) is how far back you can see; data retention is a separate, opt-in deletion feature on Pro and Enterprise. And Langfuse’s page now carries the banner “Langfuse joins ClickHouse”; the GitHub licence file names ClickHouse, Inc. as copyright holder for 2023 to 2026.
At 500,000 traces and 5 seats
| Option | Formula | 500,000 traces a month |
|---|---|---|
| LangSmith Plus, 5 seats | 5 x $39 + 490,000 x $0.005 | $2,645 |
| Langfuse Cloud Pro, 12 units a trace | $199 + 900k x $8/100k + 5,000k x $7/100k | $621 |
| Langfuse Cloud Core, 12 units a trace | $29 + 900k x $8/100k + 5,000k x $7/100k | $451 |
The gap widens to $2,024 a month between LangSmith Plus and Langfuse Pro. We do not price a self-hosted server at this volume: Langfuse publishes per-container minimums, not a traces-per-server figure, and at six million units a month its own docs point production users to Kubernetes with a replicated ClickHouse.
Self-hosting Langfuse: what is free and what is not
Langfuse says you can “self-host all core Langfuse features for free without any limitations”. The repository licence is MIT (“MIT Expat”) for everything outside the ee/, web/src/ee/ and worker/src/ee/ folders, which need a valid Langfuse Enterprise License. That split is why GitHub’s API reports the licence as NOASSERTION rather than MIT. The repository had 36,168 stars on 22 October 2026.
Features that need a licence key when self-hosted, per Langfuse’s licence-key page: project-level RBAC, protected prompt labels, data retention policies, audit logs, server-side data masking, UI customization, organization creators, the organization management API with SCIM, and the instance management API. The same page says all core features and APIs are “available in Langfuse OSS (MIT licensed) without any limits.”
What Langfuse needs to run, and what the server costs
For a single server, Langfuse’s Docker Compose guide says: “We recommend that you use at least 4 cores and 16 GiB of memory”, with storage of, for example, 100 GiB. The same page warns that the Compose setup “lacks high-availability, scaling capabilities, and backup functionality”. Inside it run two Langfuse containers (web and worker), Postgres 15 or newer, ClickHouse 25.12 or newer for Langfuse v4, Redis 7 or newer, and S3-compatible blob storage (MinIO in the Compose file).
| Server | vCPU | Memory | Disk | Price a month | Meets the Langfuse VM minimum? |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hostinger KVM 2 | 2 | 8 GB | 100 GB NVMe | $8.79, renews $14.99 | No, half the cores and memory |
| Hostinger KVM 4 Our pick | 4 | 16 GB | 200 GB NVMe | $12.99, renews $28.99 | Yes |
| Hostinger KVM 8 | 8 | 32 GB | 400 GB NVMe | $25.99, renews $49.99 | Yes, with headroom |
| DigitalOcean Basic droplet | 8 | 16 GiB | 320 GiB SSD | $96 | Yes |
Production is a different build. Langfuse recommends at least two web containers at 2 CPUs and 4 GB each, and “a minimum of 3 replicas” of ClickHouse with 3 Keeper replicas. Mapped onto DigitalOcean Basic droplets (3 ClickHouse nodes at 8 GiB, 3 app nodes at 4 GiB, one each for Postgres and Redis) that is about $264 a month before Keeper nodes, blob storage, backups and bandwidth. That layout is our mapping of Langfuse’s minimums, not a vendor-certified build. See Hostinger VPS plans.
What self-hosting replaces, and the spend avoided
| Self-hosted server | Against LangSmith Plus ($567) | Against Langfuse Core at 12 units ($115) |
|---|---|---|
| Hostinger KVM 4, promotional $12.99 Our pick | $554.01 a month less | $102.01 a month less |
| Hostinger KVM 4, renewal $28.99 | $538.01 a month less ($6,456.12 a year) | $86.01 a month less |
| DigitalOcean Basic 16 GiB, $96 | $471 a month less | $-19 (costs $19 less than self-hosting) |
| Illustrative highly available layout, $264 | $303 a month less | $149 a month more |
The honest reading: against LangSmith, self-hosting Langfuse on one server wins on price at this size by more than $500 a month. Against Langfuse’s own cloud the margin is $86.01 to $102.01 a month on one server, which a few hours of an engineer’s month erases, and a highly available build costs $149 more than Core. Self-host when you need data to stay on your own machine, when the per-unit bill gets large, or when you already run Postgres and ClickHouse. For the same break-even logic on the model layer, see Self-hosting an LLM against paying per token: the break-even and Open source LLM serving stacks and what each one costs to run.
Is Langfuse part of LangChain?
LangSmith is LangChain’s product: its pricing lives on langchain.com and its docs on docs.langchain.com. Langfuse’s own pricing page says “Langfuse joins ClickHouse”, and its LICENSE file reads “Copyright (c) 2023-2026 ClickHouse, Inc.” Langfuse’s comparison page lists LangChain among the 100+ frameworks it integrates with, but nothing on the primary pages we read ties it to LangChain the company. If your agents run on LangGraph, LangSmith is the vendor’s own tracer; see CrewAI vs LangGraph vs AutoGen, priced.
Who are Langfuse’s main competitors?
| Tool | Licence | Cloud price read today | Self-host |
|---|---|---|---|
| Opik | Apache-2.0, 22,822 stars | Free 25k spans; Pro $19 with 100k spans, $5 per 100k more | Free, same codebase, no user management |
| Arize Phoenix and Arize AX | Phoenix: Elastic License 2.0, 11,947 stars | AX Free 25k spans; AX Pro $50 with 50k spans | Phoenix free; ELv2 bars offering it as a managed service |
| Helicone | Apache-2.0, 6,231 stars | Hobby free 10,000 requests; Pro $79 plus usage; Team $799 | On-prem is Enterprise |
| Braintrust | No open-source repo read | Starter $0 with 1 GB; Pro $249 with 5 GB, then $3 a GB | Enterprise only |
| MLflow | Not read today | No price used | Not priced here |
Only Opik can be priced at our scenario from its own page: about $64 a month at 10 spans a trace. Arize AX publishes no rate beyond its 50k spans, Helicone shows a calculator but no per-request rate in readable text, and Braintrust bills processed gigabytes with no conversion from traces, so we do not put a 100,000-trace price on any of them. One status change surfaced while checking: on 19 October 2026 Helicone’s pricing page carried the banner “Helicone Joins Mintlify”; on 22 October 2026 it read “Helicone is no longer part of Mintlify. Details to come soon.”
Where search results get it wrong
We captured Google’s AI Overview and AI Mode for “langfuse vs langsmith” on 19 October 2026 and checked each claim against the vendors’ pages, re-read on 22 October 2026.
| Search result says | Vendor page says |
|---|---|
| AI Mode: LangSmith is US cloud by default, other locations only on enterprise self-host | LangSmith’s pricing page lists “LangChain’s Cloud (US or EU)” on paid cloud plans |
| AI Mode: Langfuse retains data up to 3 years on Pro and Enterprise | 3 years is data access. Data retention is a separate, opt-in deletion feature |
| AI Mode: free self-hosting includes RBAC and SSO | SSO and RBAC are listed for open source, but project-level RBAC, audit logs, SCIM and retention policies need a licence key |
| AI Overview: free open-source tier on Docker or Kubernetes | The software is free. The Docker Compose setup has no high availability or backups, and Langfuse asks for at least 4 cores and 16 GiB for it |
| Video snippet: Langfuse is free for all frameworks while LangSmith is paid | LangSmith has a $0 Developer plan with 5,000 base traces; Langfuse Cloud’s paid plans start at $29 |
| AI Mode: LangSmith has open-source SDKs | True, but the langchain-ai/langsmith-sdk repository was archived on 16 October 2026; its description says the Python SDK moved to langsmith-python and the JS SDK to langsmith-javascript |
Which one to pick
| If you | Pick | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Build on LangChain or LangGraph and keep traces 14 days | LangSmith | $39 a seat with 10,000 traces; the vendor’s own tracer |
| Have a growing team and shallow traces | Langfuse Cloud Core | $29 a month with unlimited users; cheaper than LangSmith Plus below 76 units a trace at 100,000 traces |
| Must keep trace data on your own server | Self-hosted Langfuse on Hostinger KVM 4 Our pick | MIT core, $12.99 a month promotional, meets Langfuse’s 4-core, 16 GiB minimum. See Hostinger VPS plans |
| Need high availability at scale | Langfuse on Kubernetes, or Langfuse Cloud Pro | Compose has no HA; our HA mapping is about $264 a month before staff time |
| Want the cheapest priced cloud row | Opik | $19 a month with 100k spans; Apache-2.0 to self-host |
The tools on this page
Hostinger Our pick
VPS hosting with root access. KVM 4 is 4 vCPU cores, 16 GB RAM, 200 GB NVMe and 16 TB bandwidth at $12.99 a month on the promotional price, renewing at $28.99; plans are paid upfront and include free weekly backups. It is the smallest Hostinger plan that meets Langfuse’s single-server minimum. See Hostinger VPS plans.
LangSmith
LangChain’s tracing and evaluation platform. Developer is $0 with 5,000 base traces; Plus is $39 a seat with 10,000 base traces, then $0.005 a trace; base traces are kept 14 days. Self-hosting is an Enterprise add-on.
Braintrust
Tracing and evaluation platform billed by processed data: Starter $0 with 1 GB and 14-day retention, Pro $249 a month with 5 GB, then $3 a GB. On-prem is Enterprise.
MLflow
Open-source ML platform whose GenAI side markets “LLM and Agent Observability”: tracing of prompts, retrievals and tool calls.
Arize
Arize AX is the paid platform (Free with 25k spans, Pro $50 with 50k spans); Arize Phoenix is its self-hostable sibling under the Elastic License 2.0, free on your own infrastructure.
Langfuse, Opik, Arize Phoenix and Helicone have no tool page on this site yet; they link to their own pricing or licence pages.
How we checked
Every price, limit and licence on this page was read on the vendor’s own page in a rendered browser on 22 October 2026: LangChain’s pricing, billing and self-hosting docs; Langfuse’s cloud and self-host pricing, its FAQ and its self-hosting docs (licence key, containers, Postgres, ClickHouse, cache, blob storage and the Docker Compose VM tab); Hostinger and DigitalOcean server pricing; and Opik, Arize, Helicone and Braintrust pricing. Licences and stars come from each repository’s LICENSE file and the GitHub REST API the same day. All 96 facts were first collected on 19 October 2026 and every quote was confirmed again on 22 October 2026. Team sizes, units per trace and every total are our arithmetic. We did not run Langfuse or LangSmith under load, so this is a price check, not a performance test.
Questions people ask about Langfuse and LangSmith pricing
Is LangSmith free or paid?
Both. The Developer plan is $0 for one seat with up to 5,000 base traces a month. Plus is $39 a seat a month with 10,000 base traces in total, then $0.005 a trace. Base traces are kept 14 days; longer retention costs more. Prices read 22 October 2026.
How much does LangSmith cost for 3 users and 100,000 traces a month?
$567 a month on Plus: 3 seats at $39 is $117, plus 90,000 traces past the included 10,000 at $0.005 each, $450. That is the 14-day retention bill; extended retention is extra at a rate LangChain’s pages do not publish.
How much does Langfuse Cloud cost for 100,000 traces a month?
On Core, $29 a month if each trace is one unit and $115 at 12 units a trace (one trace, ten observations, one score), using Langfuse’s $8 and $7 per 100k graduated rates. Pro is $285 for the same 12 units a trace. Core has unlimited users.
What is a Langfuse billable unit?
Any tracing data point sent to Langfuse: each trace, each observation inside it (spans, events and generations) and each score. A trace with ten steps and one score is twelve units, so trace depth drives the bill as much as trace count does.
Can I self-host Langfuse for free, and what does it really cost?
The core is MIT licensed and free without limits. The cost is the server: Langfuse asks for at least 4 cores and 16 GiB for its Docker Compose setup, which is $12.99 a month on Hostinger KVM 4’s promotional price ($28.99 at renewal) or $96 on a DigitalOcean Basic droplet, plus your engineer’s time.
Which Langfuse features need a licence key when self-hosted?
Project-level RBAC, protected prompt labels, data retention policies, audit logs, server-side data masking, UI customization, organization creators, the organization management API with SCIM, and the instance management API. Code in the ee folders needs a Langfuse Enterprise License.
Can I self-host LangSmith?
Only on the Enterprise plan. LangChain’s docs describe self-hosted LangSmith as an add-on to Enterprise, running on ClickHouse for traces, PostgreSQL, Redis or Valkey, and optional blob storage. No self-host price is published.
Is Langfuse part of LangChain?
Not on the primary pages we read. Langfuse’s pricing page says “Langfuse joins ClickHouse” and its licence names ClickHouse, Inc. as copyright holder. LangSmith is LangChain’s product. Langfuse lists LangChain among the frameworks it integrates with.
Who are Langfuse’s main competitors?
LangSmith, Opik, Arize Phoenix and Arize AX, Helicone, Braintrust and MLflow. Of these, Opik Pro is the cheapest cloud row we could price: $19 a month with 100k spans and $5 per 100k more, about $64 at our 100,000-trace scenario.
Related reading
- Open source LLM serving stacks and what each one costs to run
- RAG frameworks compared, with prices and licence catches
- Self-hosted AI agent platforms against their paid clouds
- CrewAI vs LangGraph vs AutoGen, priced
- Self-hosting an LLM against paying per token: the break-even
Sources
- LangSmith pricing, read 22 October 2026.
- LangSmith docs, billing and trace retention, read 22 October 2026.
- LangSmith docs, self-hosted, read 22 October 2026.
- Langfuse pricing (Cloud) and pricing FAQ, read 22 October 2026.
- Langfuse pricing, self-hosted, read 22 October 2026.
- Langfuse self-hosting docs: licence key, containers, Postgres, ClickHouse, cache, blob storage, read 22 October 2026.
- Langfuse docs, Docker Compose deployment (VM tab), read 22 October 2026.
- langfuse/langfuse LICENSE and ee/LICENSE, GitHub REST API, read 22 October 2026.
- langchain-ai/langsmith-sdk, GitHub REST API, read 22 October 2026.
- Hostinger VPS hosting, read 22 October 2026.
- DigitalOcean Droplet pricing, read 22 October 2026.
- Opik (Comet) pricing and self-host docs, read 22 October 2026.
- Arize pricing, read 22 October 2026.
- Arize Phoenix licence and architecture docs, read 22 October 2026.
- Helicone pricing, read 22 October 2026.
- Braintrust pricing, read 22 October 2026.
- MLflow, LLM and agent observability, read 22 October 2026.
- Google AI Overview and AI Mode for “langfuse vs langsmith”, our capture, 19 October 2026.
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