Braintrust alternatives
Braintrust is built around a production trace. What that suits, what it costs once you pass the free tier, and where a conversation is the better unit.
Braintrust describes itself as an observability platform for agents. Its own documentation order tells you the shape: wire it up, observe, annotate, then evaluate.
Production comes first and evaluations are derived from it. That is a coherent design and it suits teams whose application is a chain of model calls they already trace.
What it costs
| Starter | Pro | Enterprise | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Platform fee | Free | 249 dollars a month | Custom |
| Processed data | 1 GB, then 4 dollars per GB | 5 GB, then 3 dollars per GB | Custom |
| Scores | 10,000, then 2.50 per 1,000 | 50,000, then 1.50 per 1,000 | Custom |
| Retention | 14 days | 30 days | Custom |
| Human review scores | One per project | Unlimited | Unlimited |
Two lines there matter more than the headline fee. Scores are metered, so scoring more of your traffic costs more, and the free tier allows one human review score per project.
Human review is how you find out whether an automated score is any good, so a tier that limits it limits the thing worth doing most.
Where a conversation is the better unit
A trace is the right primitive for an application you built out of model calls. A phone call is not that shape, and neither is a WhatsApp thread that ran over three days.
Braintrust can trace voice frameworks and attach audio to a span, and its own cookbook scores a voice example by exact text match on the transcript. That is tracing with audio in it rather than audio measurement.
| Braintrust | Evidova | |
|---|---|---|
| Primitive | A trace | A conversation that already happened |
| Arrives by | SDK or OpenTelemetry, from your code | The platform's own webhook, no code |
| Open source | The libraries, not the platform | No |
| Self-hosting | Enterprise only | No |
| Scoring cost | Metered per score | Deterministic checks on everything |
Which to pick
If you add tracing to your own application and want one place for traces, experiments and evaluations, Braintrust is a strong and well-built answer. We do not do that job.
If the conversations arrive from Retell, Vapi, WhatsApp or Intercom and nobody wants to add tracing anywhere, a platform that reads those webhooks directly is less work and no code.
Everything above was read on each company's own site and documentation on 5 October 2026. Pricing and features move. Check the source before you make a decision on it, and tell us if we have something wrong.
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