Framework-agnostic by design. No ecosystem lock-in.
Any LLM, any framework, any team.
LangSmith is deeply tied to the LangChain ecosystem. LangWatch is OpenTelemetry-native and framework-agnostic, with agent simulation, open-source transparency, and a workflow non-engineers can actually use.
Join thousands of AI developers shipping reliable agents with LangWatch.
How LangWatch compares to LangSmith.
Five things teams care about when picking a quality layer for agents. Each row shows what LangSmith ships today and what LangWatch gives you on day one.
OpenAI Agents, Anthropic, CrewAI, AutoGen, Pydantic AI, your custom stack. OpenTelemetry is the universal data model.
Optimised for LangChain and LangGraph. OpenTelemetry exists, but the experience is built around one ecosystem.
Scenario testing for multi-turn, multi-tool, multi-modal flows. Go beyond input/output pairs.
Evaluation framework focused on input/output pairs and trace analysis. Limited for complex agent interactions.
Transparent codebase. Self-host with Docker or Helm. Customize anything for enterprise requirements.
Closed-source cloud platform. Enterprise self-hosting is available but with limited transparency and customization.
Platform UI for domain experts. Programmatic APIs for developers. One source of truth across both.
Primarily designed for technical teams. Prompt management and eval workflows require developer expertise.
Adversarial safety and security testing, an AI gateway for every model and key, and a governance layer with control over every agent in your org, plus quality-aware alerts on eval-score drops.
LangSmith centers on tracing and evals within the LangChain ecosystem. No built-in red teaming, AI gateway, or org-wide agent governance.
Three reasons agent teams choose LangWatch.
OTEL-native instrumentation works the same across OpenAI Agents, CrewAI, LangGraph, Pydantic AI, and bespoke frameworks.
Run thousands of multi-turn scenarios in CI. Catch reasoning drift, tool failures, and out-of-policy behaviour before launch.
Domain experts design scenarios in the UI. Engineers implement evaluators in code. The workbench is shared, not bolted on.
AI-powered Ask finds errors and anomalies for you, across flame charts, span lists, topology and graph views, waterfall traces with a full audit trail, and your own saved lenses.
“We were ecosystem-locked. Moving to OTEL with LangWatch meant we could swap frameworks without losing a quarter of work.”
One platform. Every framework.
Connect in five minutes. OpenTelemetry-native. Agent simulation included on day one.