When do you pick OpenLIT over Langfuse?

Category: Observability & Tracing

Answer

Langfuse is a hosted platform; OpenLIT is an open-source OTel-native exporter. Pick Langfuse when you want a polished UI, hosted retention, and a quick start. Pick OpenLIT when you already bake on OpenTelemetry and need to send traces to any OTel-compatible backend (Tempo, Jaeger, Honeycomb).

Concrete examples from the fca project context

Example 1

Langfuse: cloud-hosted SDK + dashboard + evals.

Example 2

OpenLIT: OTel-native, ships metrics + traces; pair with Grafana Tempo for storage.

Example 3

Both can coexist — send traces to OTel and LLM-specific annotations to Langfuse.

Data flow / flow chart

app -> (OTel) -> OpenLIT -> Tempo / Jaeger
  app -> (Langfuse SDK) -> Langfuse cloud
  (use Langfuse for hosted evals, OTel for cross-language tracing)

Takeaway

Match the tool to your stack. OTel-first teams use OpenLIT; quick-start teams use Langfuse.