agenttrail vs openlit
openlit is much bigger: 2.7k stars against 644.
They split the axes: agenttrail leads on setup ease, openlit on model freedom.
Stars and commit dates come from our own daily tracking. The six axes are read off each project's documentation by our review pipeline, so they describe what a project says about itself, not what we measured in its code.
Where they stand today
Provides a local, real-time observability map of coding agents' plans, tool calls, and file edits without any cloud service, account, or telemetry.
- Stars
- 644
- Tracked growth
- not tracked long enough
- Maturity
- ●●●●●
- Last commit
- 4d ago
- Language
- HTML
- License
- MIT
- Cost to run
- Free, local
OpenLIT provides an OpenTelemetry-native, open-source AI observability platform combining traces, built-in evaluations, a rule engine, prompt management and guardrails in one stack.
- Stars
- 2.7k
- Tracked growth
- +9.5%
- Maturity
- ●●●●●
- Last commit
- 1d ago
- Language
- TypeScript
- License
- Apache-2.0
- Cost to run
- Self-hosted; you pay for LLM/provider API usage.
Six axes, head to head
Each axis runs 0 to 5. The label under a score is what that project's own docs claim, not a category average.
| Axis | agenttrail | openlit |
|---|---|---|
Context depth How much of your codebase it sees before it answers: the open diff, the diff plus related files, or the whole repository. | ●●●●● Whole-repo analysis | ●●●●● Full-stack traces |
Noise control How it keeps output volume down — severity thresholds, deduplication, incremental runs over new commits only. | ●●●●● Minimal signals | ●●●●● Rule engine filters |
Customization How far it bends to your team: custom rules, prompts, style guides, per-path config. | ●●●●● Repo-level config | ●●●●● Rules & prompts |
Privacy Whether your code stays on your own infrastructure: fully local, self-hostable, or cloud API only. | ●●●●● Fully local | ●●●●● Self-hostable |
Model freedom Whether you can point it at any provider, or it is wired to one. | ●●●●● Multi-provider | ●●●●● Bring-your-key |
Setup ease What it takes to get a first useful run out of it. | ●●●●● One-command start | ●●●●● Docker + config |
Which one to pick
Pick agenttrail if…
Privacy-first — run with one command to get a local, read-only live dashboard of agent plans and file activity bound to 127.0.0.1 with no external telemetry.
- Setup ease: One-command start (5/5 against 3/5)
Pick openlit if…
Open-source, self-hostable — choose OpenLIT when you need vendor-neutral, full-stack LLM observability plus integrated evaluations, rule-driven guardrails, and prompt/version management.
- Model freedom: Bring-your-key (5/5 against 3/5)
What people want from each one
sodiumsun/agenttrail
openlit/openlit
Hacker News: Show HN: OpenLIT – Open-Source LLM Observability with OpenTelemetry drew 62 points and 22 comments.
Questions people ask
Is agenttrail better than openlit?
They split the axes: agenttrail leads on setup ease, openlit on model freedom. agenttrail is worth picking when privacy-first — run with one command to get a local, read-only live dashboard of agent plans and file activity bound to 127.0.0.1 with no external telemetry.
Which of agenttrail and openlit keeps my code private?
agenttrail: Fully local (5/5). openlit: Self-hostable (4/5).
What does each one cost to run?
agenttrail: Free, local. openlit: Self-hosted; you pay for LLM/provider API usage..
Full profiles: sodiumsun/agenttrail and openlit/openlit. Everything else in Observability & tracing.