CrewCheck vs Helicone

What Helicone does well

Helicone is a lightweight LLM proxy with fast setup, cost tracking, and request logging. Its minimal integration footprint — one line in your OpenAI client — makes it popular with engineers who want basic observability without heavy SDK dependency. The dashboard provides spending summaries and request latency data.

Where CrewCheck pulls ahead

Helicone is an observability tool that happens to be a proxy. CrewCheck is a governance gateway that enforces compliance. Helicone logs every request but does not scan for Indian PII, does not apply DPDP policy packs, and does not produce the compliance evidence that Indian regulators expect.

When a user sends an Aadhaar number in a chat message and Helicone forwards it transparently to OpenAI, the compliance violation has already occurred — and Helicone's log is evidence of it, not protection against it. CrewCheck intercepts the same request, detects the Aadhaar number using Verhoeff checksum validation, redacts it to [AADHAAR-REDACTED], and logs the governance event before the model provider ever sees the raw number.

The cost dashboard difference matters too. Helicone displays costs in USD. CrewCheck's dashboard shows costs in INR with per-agent and per-policy-pack breakdowns, aligned with how Indian finance teams think about SaaS spend.