---
title: "Alternatives: the 7 categories a buyer shortlists against"
canonical_url: "https://tokenobserve.com/compare"
published: 2026-09-02
last_updated: 2026-10-21
---

# Alternatives: the 7 categories a buyer shortlists against

Each page below names the real products in its category, states where they win before it states anything else, and lists the cases in which the alternative is the right purchase. Two of them recommend the alternative for a large share of readers. Every claim made about a named vendor is that vendor's own published claim and has not been independently tested.

- A subscriptions spreadsheet and the billing consoles (https://tokenobserve.com/compare/spreadsheets-and-billing-consoles): Finance owns the total. This owns the shape: a vendor, a tool, a team and an owner email on every line.
- LLM gateways and AI proxies (https://tokenobserve.com/compare/llm-gateways): Decide whether you need to carry model requests, explain the AI bill, or govern one agent’s next call. Named: Kong AI Gateway, Agent Router, Portkey (Prisma AIRS AI Gateway), LiteLLM, Cloudflare AI Gateway, MuleSoft Omni Gateway.
- LLM observability, tracing and evaluation (https://tokenobserve.com/compare/llm-observability): Match the tool to the question: what the provider charged, what an agent did, or what it may do next. Named: LangSmith, Langfuse, Arize, Datadog LLM Observability, OpenTelemetry.
- AI security platforms and AI firewalls (https://tokenobserve.com/compare/ai-security-platforms): Use Token Observe to govern the requests you route through its gateway. Broader AI security coverage belongs alongside it; pattern-based detection remains heuristic. Named: Palo Alto Prisma AIRS, Cisco AI Defense, Zenity, Noma, WitnessAI, Lakera.
- Cloud-provider native agent controls (https://tokenobserve.com/compare/cloud-native-controls): If every agent, model and tool lives in one cloud, use that cloud’s controls. The argument here is for the estate that does not. Named: Amazon Bedrock AgentCore (Cedar authorisation), Microsoft Entra Agent ID, Microsoft Agent 365, Google agent IAM.
- A proxy your platform team writes (https://tokenobserve.com/compare/build-your-own): For a small estate, a few hundred lines of proxy is usually the right answer. The cost arrives later, and it arrives in specific places. Named: LiteLLM, Envoy, NGINX, Open Policy Agent, OpenTelemetry Collector, PostgreSQL.
- Doing nothing (https://tokenobserve.com/compare/doing-nothing): With three agents, no regulated data and no incident, doing nothing is often the correct decision. This page is about what changes it.