BraintrustBraintrust
Evaluation-first LLM development
Braintrust puts evaluation at the centre rather than treating it as a feature of tracing, with a playground, scoring functions and a review workflow designed for the humans who grade outputs. It is the most opinionated tool in the category.
[ 01 ] The verdict
The best experience for teams who treat prompt changes like code changes and want a review gate on quality. If you mainly need to see what happened in production, a tracing-first tool is cheaper.
Best for
Product teams shipping frequent prompt and model changes who need a quality gate in CI.
Watch out
Getting value requires actually writing scorers. Teams hoping evaluation happens automatically will be disappointed.
Strengths
- Excellent side-by-side experiment comparison
- Human review queues integrate cleanly with automated scoring
- Hybrid deployment keeps sensitive data in your own cloud
- Strong CI integration for regression gating
Trade-offs
- Requires investment in writing good scorers
- Smaller ecosystem than the incumbent
- Cost model has several moving parts
[ 02 ] What it actually does
What Braintrust actually ships.
Playground
Compare prompts and models across a dataset in one view with live scoring.
Scorers
Code and model-graded scoring functions, versioned alongside your application.
Human review
Queues for expert graders with agreement tracking against automated scores.
Brainstore
Purpose-built log store designed for fast filtering over very large trace volumes.
[ 03 ] Head-to-head
Braintrust against the tools it usually loses or wins deals to.
[ 04 ] Braintrust alternatives
