Braintrust vs. Athina

Braintrust and Athina are two AI development platforms designed to enhance model performance, but they serve different functions. Braintrust focuses on LLM evaluation, helping teams assess and refine AI models, while Athina specializes in structured prompt management, making it easier to organize and optimize AI interactions. While both platforms offer useful features, they also have limitations that may require additional tools to achieve a fully integrated AI development workflow.

For teams looking for a more complete solution, another option exists. Sandgarden brings together the strengths of both Braintrust and Athina while addressing their shortcomings, offering a more scalable and efficient AI development environment. In this comparison, we’ll examine how Braintrust and Athina stack up while also considering how an alternative like Sandgarden can provide a more seamless and flexible AI development experience.

Braintrust’s LLM evaluation capabilities versus Athina’s structured AI prompt management.

Feature Comparison

Prompt Management

LLM Evaluation

Version Control

Analytics

Tracing

Metrics

Logging

API First

Self-Hosted

On-Prem Deployment

Dedicated Infrastructure

Access Control

SSO

Data Encryption

Braintrust

Braintrust offers an LLM evaluation suite, providing tools for testing and optimizing model performance over time. With a focus on experimentation and a user-friendly testing library, users can quantify results against AI initiatives.

At the core of Braintrust is a software development kit (SDK) that integrates into existing infrastructure and CI/CD pipelines. This enables continuous evaluations that offer insights into LLM accuracy and reliability. As a third-party evaluator Braintrust is model agnostic, allowing it to work across multiple systems and platforms.

That said, Braintrust is not without its drawbacks:

Limited ability to move workloads to production
Limited scalability for large-scale operations
Unwieldy for less technical users

View more Braintrust alternatives

Athina

Athina empowers teams to experiment, evaluate, and monitor AI-driven applications. With its internal IDE, Athina offers a suite of tools to create, manage, and evaluate datasets, prompts, and evaluations.

The platform also includes observability tools, allowing teams to monitor AI model performance, manage costs, and maintain quality over time. In sum, Athina helps businesses efficiently integrate high quality and reliable AI powered workflows into their applications.

That said, Athina is not without its drawbacks:

Onboarding requires a lot of trial and error
No seamless way of integrating customer data
Limited scalability for large-scale operations

View more Athina alternatives

Sandgarden

Sandgarden provides production-ready infrastructure by automatically crafting the pipeline of tools and processes needed to experiment with AI. This helps businesses move from test to production without figuring out how to deploy, monitor, and scale the stack.

With Sandgarden you get an enterprise AI runtime engine that lets you stand up a test, refine and iterate, all in support of determining how to accelerate your business processes quickly. Time to value is their ethos and as such the platform is freely available to try without going through a sales process.

Conclusion

Braintrust and Athina each provide valuable AI development features, but neither offers a complete, end-to-end solution. Braintrust is known for its LLM evaluation capabilities, allowing teams to assess and optimize model performance, yet it lacks key features like version control, real-time analytics, and enterprise security. Athina, on the other hand, focuses on structured prompt management but falls short in areas such as model tracking, deployment flexibility, and secure access control. Both platforms require additional integrations and workarounds, leading to inefficiencies for teams looking to streamline their AI workflows.

Sandgarden stands out as the superior choice by offering a fully integrated AI development environment that eliminates the limitations of Braintrust and Athina. With comprehensive support for prompt management, advanced analytics, version control, and enterprise-grade security, Sandgarden ensures that AI teams can work efficiently without relying on multiple third-party tools. Its API-first architecture and flexible deployment options provide unmatched scalability, making it the ideal solution for organizations that require both power and simplicity in their AI operations.