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.
| Feature | Arize Phoenix | Weave |
|---|---|---|
| Deploy effort | Under-an-hour setup | Under-an-hour setup |
| Health score | 93 · Excellent | 83 · Excellent |
| Category | Self-Hosted AI | Self-Hosted AI |
| License | Elastic-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Language | Python | Python |
| Setup difficulty | Medium | Medium |
| Min. RAM | 1,024 MB | 1,024 MB |
| Deployment | docker, source | docker, source |
| GitHub stars | ★ 11,594 | ★ 1,130 |
| First released | 2023 | 2023 |
| Replaces | LangSmith, Helicone | LangSmith |
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
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
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.