Hey everyone, I've been working on a team project where we're building a few customer-facing chatbots. We started with Traceloop for tracing our LLM calls because it was really easy to set up and the UI was super intuitive for our small group.
As we moved to production and our call volume increased, we felt we needed more granular control and switched to LangSmith. Now I'm trying to figure out if we made the right call or if we just hit a specific scaling snag with Traceloop.
My main thing is, for those who have used both in a real production environment, which do you prefer and why? I'm curious about a few specific points:
The cost model feels different. Traceloop's per-trace pricing seemed simple at first, but LangSmith's credit system based on steps... which ends up being more predictable for a high-volume app?
Also, the depth of analysis. I liked how Traceloop visualized the trace chain, but LangSmith seems to let me drill down into individual steps with more detail, like latency distributions and exact token counts. Is that just my imagination?
Finally, team workflow. We have more engineers jumping in now. LangSmith's dataset management and testing features look powerful, but are they actually useful day-to-day, or just nice to have? With Traceloop, sharing a trace was just a link – that was pretty great.
Just trying to learn from others' experiences before we double down on one ecosystem! 😅