Arize Phoenix vs Weave

A side-by-side comparison of two self-hosted self-hosted ai options — licensing, setup difficulty, resource needs, and what each one replaces.

Not the right match-up?
FeatureArize PhoenixWeave
Deploy effortUnder-an-hour setupUnder-an-hour setup
Health score93 · Excellent83 · Excellent
CategorySelf-Hosted AISelf-Hosted AI
LicenseElastic-2.0Apache-2.0
LanguagePythonPython
Setup difficultyMediumMedium
Min. RAM1,024 MB1,024 MB
Deploymentdocker, sourcedocker, source
GitHub stars★ 11,594★ 1,130
First released20232023
ReplacesLangSmith, HeliconeLangSmith

What are Arize Phoenix and Weave?

Arize Phoenix

Phoenix by Arize is an open-source observability platform for experimentation, evaluation and troubleshooting of LLM and ML applications. It runs as a self-hosted server collecting OpenTelemetry traces from AI apps.

  • LLM tracing and spans
  • Built-in evaluators
  • OpenTelemetry-based
  • Self-hostable

Weave

Weave is a lightweight toolkit from Weights & Biases for logging, tracing and evaluating LLM application calls. The tracing server component can be self-hosted to keep AI evaluation data on your own infrastructure.

  • LLM call tracing
  • Evaluation framework
  • Self-hostable server
  • Python-native

Arize Phoenix vs Weave: key differences

Both projects are written in Python. Licensing differs — Elastic-2.0 for Arize Phoenix versus Apache-2.0 for Weave. Arize Phoenix has the considerably larger community, at 11,594 GitHub stars versus 1,130.

Why pick each one

Choose Arize Phoenix if…

  • Released under the Elastic-2.0 license
  • First-class Docker support for quick deployment
  • Mature project with 11.6k GitHub stars
  • Written in Python
Arize Phoenix details

Choose Weave if…

  • Released under the Apache-2.0 license
  • First-class Docker support for quick deployment
  • Active community (1.1k GitHub stars)
  • Written in Python
Weave details

Frequently asked questions

Is Arize Phoenix or Weave better?

Neither is universally better. Arize Phoenix has the larger community; both share a medium setup difficulty, so the decision comes down to features and licensing.

Are Arize Phoenix and Weave free and open-source?

Yes. Arize Phoenix is licensed under Elastic-2.0 and Weave under Apache-2.0. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.

Can I run Arize Phoenix and Weave with Docker?

Arize Phoenix: yes. Weave: yes.

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