These tools solve different problems. Langfuse is observability. Stockyard is a proxy with observability built in.
Langfuse is an LLM observability and evaluation platform. It does not proxy requests, cache responses, rate-limit users, or fail over between providers. It instruments your code to capture traces.
Stockyard is an LLM proxy that includes observability. It sits between your app and providers, routing requests through a middleware chain. Tracing happens automatically because every request passes through the proxy.
Many teams use both: Stockyard for routing and Langfuse for deep evaluation. But if you want observability without adding an SDK to your application, Stockyard gives you that out of the box.
| Feature | Stockyard | Langfuse |
|---|---|---|
| Primary function | LLM proxy + observability | LLM observability + evaluation |
| Proxies requests | ✓ Yes | No (SDK instrumentation) |
| Deployment | Single ~25MB Go binary | Docker: Postgres required, ClickHouse recommended |
| External deps | None (embedded SQLite) | Postgres (required) |
| Open source | Proxy: Apache 2.0 / Platform: BSL 1.1 | MIT (24k stars) |
| Providers | 40+ (routes requests) | N/A (does not route) |
| Pricing (cloud) | Free unlimited, paid from $0.99/mo per tool | Free 50k units/mo, Core $29/mo, Pro $199/mo |
| Tracing | ✓ Automatic (every proxied request) | ✓ Via SDK integration |
| Evaluations | Via Tack Room experiments | ✓ Deep eval framework, annotation queues |
| Caching | ✓ Built-in | No |
| Rate limiting | ✓ Built-in | No |
| Failover | ✓ Built-in | No |
| Prompt management | ✓ Tack Room | ✓ Prompt management |
| Datasets | Via Lasso replay | ✓ Dataset management |
| Audit trail | ✓ Hash-chained | No |
| Integration effort | Change one URL | Add SDK + instrument code |
Data reflects publicly available documentation as of March 2026.
Zero-effort observability. Change your base URL to Stockyard and every request is automatically traced with cost, latency, tokens, and provider info. Langfuse requires adding their SDK to your application and instrumenting each call.
Proxy features included. Stockyard is not just observability. It is a full proxy with caching, failover, rate limiting, model aliasing, and guardrails. Langfuse does none of these.
No external database. Stockyard uses embedded SQLite. Langfuse requires Postgres and recommends ClickHouse for production workloads.
If evaluation is your primary workflow, Langfuse is significantly more capable. Annotation queues, dataset management, scoring pipelines, and experiment tracking are features Stockyard's Tack Room has not matched yet.
Langfuse's SDK integration gives you deeper traces than proxy-level observability. You can trace individual function calls, retrieval steps, and chain execution, not just the final LLM call. If you need sub-request granularity, Langfuse is the better tool.
Langfuse is fully MIT-licensed. If your organization requires MIT for everything, Langfuse is a cleaner licensing story.
Many teams use both: Stockyard as the proxy layer (routing, caching, cost tracking) and Langfuse for evaluation and experimentation. They are complementary, not exclusive.
These are different tools. Langfuse is an observability and evaluation platform. Stockyard is a proxy that includes observability. If you need deep evals, use Langfuse. If you need a proxy with automatic tracing, use Stockyard. If you need both, they work together.