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DeepEval 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?
DE DeepEval Unit testing framework for LLM outputs VS WE Weave Toolkit for tracking and evaluating LLM applications
FeatureDeepEvalWeave
Deploy effortRead-the-docs projectUnder-an-hour setup
Health score95 · Excellent83 · Excellent
CategorySelf-Hosted AISelf-Hosted AI
LicenseApache-2.0Apache-2.0
LanguagePythonPython
Setup difficultyMediumMedium
Min. RAM1,024 MB1,024 MB
Deploymentsourcedocker, source
GitHub stars★ 18,419★ 1,130
First released20232023
ReplacesLangSmith, BraintrustLangSmith

What are DeepEval and Weave?

DeepEval

DeepEval is an open-source evaluation framework that brings unit-testing-style assertions to large language model outputs. It includes metrics for hallucination, relevancy, and bias and integrates with pytest for local CI.

  • Pytest-style LLM tests
  • 14+ built-in metrics
  • Synthetic dataset generation
  • CI/CD integration

Read the full DeepEval guide →

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

DeepEval vs Weave: key differences

Both projects are written in Python. DeepEval has the considerably larger community, at 18,419 GitHub stars versus 1,130. Weave lists first-class Docker deployment; DeepEval does not.

Why pick each one

Choose DeepEval if…

  • Pytest-style LLM tests
  • Rich metric library
  • Runs in CI

Watch out for

  • LLM judge token costs
  • Cloud platform upsell
DeepEval 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 DeepEval or Weave better?

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

Are DeepEval and Weave free and open-source?

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

Can I run DeepEval and Weave with Docker?

DeepEval: check the project docs for container support. Weave: yes.

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