Alye vs LangSmith: pricing and fit compared

At a glance

	Alye	LangSmith
Best with	Official OpenAI, Anthropic and Google clients; Express and NestJS; OpenTelemetry	LangChain and LangGraph, also usable without them
Free plan	500,000 calls a month, 14 days of history, 3 members	Developer: up to 5,000 base traces a month
Entry paid plan	Team: $49 a month in total for 10 million calls, unlimited members	Plus: $39 per seat a month, up to 10,000 base traces, then pay as you go
Per-seat fees	None	Yes
History	14 days on Free, 90 days on Team, 365 on Enterprise	Base traces 14 days; extended traces 180 days, for an extra fee
Regional and marketplace prices	Azure OpenAI, Vertex AI and Bedrock by region	Not listed on its pricing page
Alerts	Spend, forecast, error rate, latency and silent services, to Slack, Teams or email, checked every minute	Not listed on its pricing page
Evaluation and prompt tooling	Not offered	Yes

Which one to choose

Choose LangSmith if

Your app is built on LangChain or LangGraph.
Evaluation and prompt iteration matter more than production cost.

Choose Alye if

You call providers directly, without LangChain.
Your whole team, including on-call, needs access without per-seat costs.
You need spend per customer, regional prices and alerts in Slack or Teams.

What per-seat pricing means in practice

A team of 8 engineers on LangSmith Plus pays $312 a month in seats before any traces beyond the included amount. On Alye Team the same 8 people, and anyone else on call, are included in the $49 a month.

Also compared: Alye vs Langfuse · Alye vs Helicone. New to the topic? Start with what LLM observability is.

Questions

Is Alye a LangSmith alternative?

For teams that call OpenAI, Anthropic or Google directly and care most about production cost and alerts, yes. LangSmith is the better fit for apps built on LangChain or LangGraph that need evaluation and prompt tooling.

Does Alye charge per seat like LangSmith?

No. LangSmith Plus is $39 per seat per month. Alye Team is $49 a month in total with unlimited members, so everyone on call can see the same data.

Does Alye work with LangChain?

Yes. In Python, every call LangChain makes through langchain-openai and langchain-anthropic is recorded with no extra setup; in Node.js, wrap the model with alye.wrapLangChain(). You see each model call with its tokens, cost and latency. Alye does not draw LangChain chains and graphs the way LangSmith does.