What Is Braintrust? Is It the Best for AI Observability?

Braintrust is a prominent AI observability and evaluation platform that assists teams in monitoring and assessing the quality of AI agents and large language model (LLM) applications in production. Founded by Ankur Goyal, Braintrust has garnered significant investment, notably an $80 million Series B round in February 2026, reflecting the growing importance of AI observability as critical infrastructure. The platform is used by notable companies like Notion, Stripe, and Dropbox to enhance AI performance by tracing every step of AI reasoning, from prompts to tool calls, and quickly querying millions of traces. Braintrust excels in evaluating AI outputs through built-in scorers, LLM-as-a-judge, custom code, or human review, enabling pre-shipment regression testing. However, it primarily serves as an observability tool rather than a comprehensive solution for designing, deploying, and managing AI agents, requiring users to fix issues in separate systems. Additionally, while Braintrust provides extensive tracing and evaluation capabilities, it lacks real-time guardrails and pre-production simulation features, making it more suitable for engineering-centric teams. In contrast, platforms like Voiceflow offer an integrated solution for designing, deploying, and observing AI agents, providing a seamless workflow from observation to improvement within a single tool.

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