Braintrust (braintrust.dev) is an eval-first AI observability platform for tracing, testing and improving LLM apps. See pricing, features, and how it differs…
Most software observability tools were built around a 'log everything, search later' model that works well for deterministic systems where a bug either exists or doesn't. LLM-powered products are different: the same prompt can produce subtly different, sometimes wrong, sometimes brilliant outputs, and 'quality' is often a matter of degree rather than pass/fail. Braintrust's founding premise is that teams building AI products need to start from defining what a good output looks like - through datasets, scoring criteria, and explicit test cases - and then measure every change against that definition, rather than discovering quality problems only after users complain.
This eval-first philosophy shapes the whole product: the evaluation framework lets teams run experiments against real datasets, compare prompts and models side by side, and score results using LLM-based graders, code-based scorers, or human review, so that a prompt or model change can be validated before it ships rather than debugged after the fact in production.
Evaluation alone isn't enough once an AI product is live, so Braintrust also provides production tracing: the ability to inspect every request, tool call, and reasoning step an AI agent takes, search across millions of logs, and track latency, cost, and quality metrics in real time. This closes the loop between what a team tested before shipping and what's actually happening with real users.
Two more specialized pieces extend this further. Loop is Braintrust's AI assistant for evaluation development - a team can describe, in natural language, a failure mode they want to investigate, and Loop will analyze the relevant production traces, generate an evaluation dataset around that failure, and recommend custom scorers to catch it going forward. Brainstore is the underlying data infrastructure making all of this fast at scale: a data store purpose-built for AI workloads, designed to support quick queries across millions of nested agent traces and high-cardinality observability data, which general-purpose logging databases are not well suited to handle.
Anyone researching 'Braintrust' should be aware that the name is shared by two unconnected companies. Braintrust (braintrust.dev), covered in this profile, is the San Francisco-based AI observability and evaluation platform founded by Ankur Goyal in 2023. Braintrust (usebraintrust.com) is a separate, blockchain-based freelance talent marketplace founded in San Jose in 2018 by Adam Jackson, Gabriel Luna-Ostaseski, and Brian Flynn, which connects vetted technical and design freelancers with enterprise clients and uses a BTRST token to distribute network governance and incentives to its community of contributors.
The two companies operate in entirely different markets - one is developer infrastructure for AI quality, the other is a hiring and freelance marketplace - and share no corporate relationship. Given how similar the names and even some of the branding language ('Braintrust,' talent, quality) can look at a glance, it's worth double-checking which Braintrust a source, article, or job posting is actually referring to before drawing conclusions.
Braintrust is an AI observability and evaluation platform that helps teams trace LLM applications and AI agents in production, run offline evaluations, and catch quality regressions before they reach users.
No. Braintrust (braintrust.dev) is an AI observability platform founded in 2023 by Ankur Goyal. Braintrust (usebraintrust.com) is an unrelated blockchain-based freelance talent marketplace founded in 2018.
Braintrust was founded in 2023 by Ankur Goyal, who previously founded Impira, a data management company acquired by Figma.
Braintrust offers a free Starter plan, a Pro plan starting at $249 per month, and custom Enterprise pricing for larger deployments.
Loop is Braintrust's AI assistant for evaluation development, which can analyze production traces and generate datasets and scorers from natural-language instructions.
Brainstore is Braintrust's purpose-built data store designed for fast queries across millions of nested AI agent traces.
Braintrust provides SDKs for Python, TypeScript, Go, Ruby, and C#, and works with any model or AI framework.
Braintrust's customers include Notion, Stripe, Vercel, Airtable, Instacart, Zapier, Ramp, Dropbox, Cloudflare, and BILL.