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AI · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to Spanlens

Open-source LLM observability in one line of code

Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.

  1. 1

    OpenTelemetry-native observability for agents and LLMs

    Aug 2026 · openobserve.ai · its alternatives →

  2. 2

    Hey HN, Nir, Gal and Tomer here. We’re open-sourcing a set of extensions we’ve built on top of OpenTelemetry that provide visibility into LLM applications - whether it be prompts, vector DBs and more. Here’s the repo: https://github.com/traceloop/openllmetry. There’s already a decent number of tools for LLM observability, some open-source and some not. But what we found was missing for all of them is that they were closed-protocol by design, vendor-locking you to use their observability platform or their proprietary framework for running your LLMs. It’s still early in the…

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  3. 3

    Hey HN, Henry here from Cactus. We open-sourced Needle, a 26M parameter function-calling (tool use) model. It runs at 6000 tok/s prefill and 1200 tok/s decode on consumer devices. We were always frustrated by the little effort made towards building agentic models that run on budget phones, so we conducted investigations that led to an observation: agentic experiences are built upon tool calling, and massive models are overkill for it. Tool calling is fundamentally retrieval-and-assembly (match query to tool name, extract argument values, emit JSON), not reasoning. Cross-attention…

    May 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  4. 4
    Langfuse▲771

    Open source tracing and analytics for LLM applications

    2023 · langfuse.com · its alternatives →

  5. 5

    If you've built any web-based app in the last 15 years, you probably used something like Datadog, New Relic, Sentry, etc. to monitor and trace your app, right? Why should it be different when the app you're building happens to be using LLMs? So today we're open-sourcing OpenLLMetry-JS. It's an open protocol and SDK, based on OpenTelemetry, that provides traces and metrics for LLM JS/TS applications and can be connected to any of the 15+ tools that already support OpenTelemetry. Here's the repo: https://github.com/traceloop/openllmetry-js A few months ago we launched…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  6. 6
    Openlit▲152

    One click observability & evals for LLMs & GPUs

    2024 · openlit.io · its alternatives →

  7. 7
    traceAI▲273

    Open-source LLM tracing that speaks GenAI, not HTTP.

    Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  8. 8
    Spanly▲77

    Hi HN, I'm Tim, solo founder of Spanly (https://spanly.com). I spent the last year working on MCP gateways, and debugging them with nothing better than HTTP-level APM was painful. Spanly runs its own MCP server and monitors it with itself, so I've been the first user of everything below. Spanly is observability for MCP servers, the protocol that lets agents like Claude and Cursor call your product's tools. It's a sidecar proxy, so it works with any language and requires zero code changes. Live demo (no signup): https://app.spanly.com/share/demo Sidecar source…

    Jun 2026 · spanly.com · its alternatives →

  9. 9

    Hey HN, we're super excited to share something we've been working on: OpenLIT. After an engaging preview that some of you might recall, we are now proudly announcing our first stable release! *What's OpenLIT?* Simply put, OpenLIT is an open-source tool designed to make monitoring your Large Language Model (LLM) applications straightforward. It’s built on OpenTelemetry, aiming to reduce the complexities that come with observing the behavior and usage of your LLM stack. *Beyond Basic Text Generation:* OpenLIT isn’t restricted to just text and chatbot outputs. It now includes automatic…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  10. 10
    LLMonitor▲128

    Open source monitoring and production toolkit for AI apps

    2023 · its alternatives →

  11. 11

    Hey HN, I made Browser-Use, an open-source tool that lets (all Langchain supported) LLMs execute tasks directly in the browser just with function calling. It allows you to build agents that interact with web elements using natural language prompts. We created a layer that simplifies website interaction for LLMs by extracting xPaths and interactive elements like buttons and input fields (and other fancy things). This enables you to design custom web automation and scraping functions without manual inspection through DevTools. Hasn't this been done a lot of times? Good question, as a general…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  12. 12

    One line of code, Full AI visibility.

    Jun 2026 · llm-watch.vercel.app · its alternatives →

  13. 13

    AI-driven observability for $0.20 per GB

    2024 · edgedelta.com · its alternatives →

  14. 14

    Hi HN, Hugh and Vince here. LLMonitor helps you record, trace & search your LLM queries and chatbot conversations. You can also capture user feedback on your frontend and correlate it with backend LLM queries then use that to fine-tune your own models. The project started has an internal tool in our previous (failed) AI startup. We’re aware the LLM observability space is very crowded. Apart from being open-source, we differentiate with: - Model-agnostic and minimal lock-in (no MITM of requests). - High focus on DX and dashboard clarity. - Support for complex scenarios: e.g. a chatbot that…

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  15. 15

    Aggregate uptime monitoring across OpenAI, Claude, and more

    Apr 2026 · tools.lamatic.ai · its alternatives →

  16. 16

    Open-source LLM tracing for agent visibility

    Mar 2026 · breadcrumb.sh · its alternatives →

  17. 17
    Openlayer▲197

    Slack or email alerts for when your AI fails

    2023 · openlayer.com · its alternatives →

  18. 18
    TraceLLM▲100

    OpenTelemetry for production AI applications

    Jul 2026 · tracellm.in · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    Hi HN! Langfuse is OSS observability and analytics for LLM applications (repo: https://github.com/langfuse/langfuse, 2 min demo: https://langfuse.com/video, try it yourself: https://langfuse.com/demo) Langfuse makes capturing and viewing LLM calls (execution traces) a breeze. On top of this data, you can analyze the quality, cost and latency of LLM apps. When GPT-4 dropped, we started building LLM apps – a lot of them! [1, 2] But they all suffered from the same issue: it’s hard to assure quality in 100% of cases and even to have a clear view…

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  20. 20

    Hi everyone, we’re a small team, supported by Mozilla, who are working on re-imagining a UI for training, tuning and testing local LLMs. Everything is open source. If you’ve been training your own LLMs or have always wanted to, we’d love for you to play with the tool and give feedback on what the future development experience for LLM engineering could look like.

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  21. 21
    Mi▲75

    30-line zero-config CLI agent for bug fixes + refactoring

    May 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  22. 22
    WebBrain▲117

    The sidebar agent for the rest of us

    Aug 2026 · webbrain.one · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    Self-hosted AI agent observability with tool-call tracing and decision tree visualization - tranhoangtu-it/agentlens

    Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  24. 24
    Foglamp▲101

    The missing observability layer for AI agents built on the Vercel AI SDK. Costs, latency, tokens, distributed traces, evals, and alerts for every generateText / streamText call — in two lines.

    Jun 2026 · foglamp.dev · its alternatives →

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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →