burnban vs Flightdeck

burnban and Flightdeck are both inference engines & infra tracked by AIDiveForge. Below is a side-by-side comparison of pricing, capabilities, platforms, and ownership — sourced from each tool's live website and verified before publishing.

burnban

Burnban reads supported agent log files already sitting on disk, prices the recorded usage against public API list rates, and lets you set daily, weekly, monthly, or per-agent spend caps enforced in the request path — all from a local dashboard at localhost:4141. The ledger is SQLite on your machine. No keys leave to a Burnban server, no prompts hit a control plane, no account is required. The sharp edge is the word 'supported': log format and provider coverage are scoped, and anything outside that scope remains invisible to the meter. Teams tracking unsupported agents or providers find Burnban shows them a partial picture.

Flightdeck

Every LLM call, MCP event, and tool invocation your agents make streams to a live dashboard — per-agent timelines and a fleet-wide feed, not batched logs you dig through after the incident. The vendor describes token budgets and MCP allow/block rules you set before problems hit, plus the ability to issue live directives to running agents without restarting them. The self-hosted, Apache-2.0 model means no telemetry leaves your infrastructure — critical for teams in regulated environments or those burned by SaaS observability vendors billing by event volume. The project is early-stage by star count, and the operational surface you take on by self-hosting is real.

Attribute	burnban	Flightdeck
Pricing	Free	Free
Free trial	No	No
Open source	Yes	Yes
Has API	No	No
Self-hosted option	Yes	Yes
Platforms	macOS, Linux, Windows	Docker, Python
Pros	Zero-telemetry local enforcement, so your API keys, prompts, and responses never touch a Burnban server — eliminating the trust risk that comes with cloud-based spend gateways. Daily, weekly, monthly, and per-agent spend caps enforced in the request path, so a runaway agent gets blocked before it runs up the bill rather than flagged after the invoice arrives. The subsidy repricing command converts historical log data into a qualified, shareable cost estimate against any supported model's public rates, so you can surface the real cost of local agent activity to stakeholders without needing provider-side billing access. MIT licensed single binary with checksum verification and published SBOMs, so teams with strict supply-chain policies can audit exactly what sits in their provider request path. Local SQLite ledger requires no account, signup, or cloud dependency, which means the tool keeps working when a vendor changes pricing, shuts down, or decides to monetize the data flowing through their gateway.	Real-time per-agent timeline and fleet-wide feed, so you see which agent made which call as it happens rather than reconstructing the sequence from logs after a production incident. Token budgets and MCP allow/block rules configurable before agents run, which means a misconfigured agent hits a policy ceiling instead of draining your API budget overnight. Live directive issuance to running agents, so you can redirect or constrain an agent mid-execution without tearing down and restarting the process. Apache-2.0 license with full self-hosted deployment via Docker and Helm, which means your agent traces and tool call data never leave your infrastructure — critical for teams under data residency or compliance constraints. Purpose-built for agent observability rather than adapted from generic APM tooling, so the data model matches what agents actually produce: LLM calls, MCP events, tool invocations — not HTTP spans and database queries.
Cons	Enforcement only applies to traffic routed through the local meter — agents or apps that call providers directly bypass all caps entirely, so a team with more than one or two agents faces a partial blind spot from day one. Log reading and traffic enforcement are scoped to 'supported' agents and providers; the docs do not enumerate a complete compatibility list on the landing page, so teams discover unsupported tools by finding gaps in the dashboard rather than a checklist upfront. Because Burnban is a V0.4 single-maintainer project with no API surface and no integrations layer, teams that outgrow personal spend monitoring and need org-level cost allocation, multi-seat dashboards, or CI budget gates will find nothing here to extend — at that scale they migrate to a platform with an admin layer, and Burnban becomes a retrospective curiosity. The model repricing and subsidy features produce estimates explicitly qualified as 'API-equivalent' against list rates, not actual billed amounts — teams using negotiated pricing or credits will find the numbers systematically off, making the output useful for illustration but unreliable for finance reconciliation.	The project carries a small community footprint and limited commit history, which means edge-case debugging falls entirely on your team — when an ingestion pipeline drops events under high agent concurrency, there is no community thread to reference and no vendor support to call. Self-hosting the full microservices stack (ingestion, workers, API, dashboard, sensor) means your platform team is responsible for uptime, upgrades, and failure recovery — teams without dedicated infrastructure capacity find themselves maintaining the observability layer instead of the product, and that is the point where they evaluate managed SaaS alternatives like LangSmith or Langfuse. No API surface is described in the scraped documentation, which means you cannot build automated alerting pipelines or integrate fleet metrics into your existing incident management tooling without forking the project or building against undocumented internals.

Bottom line

burnban and Flightdeck are closely matched on pricing model, openness, and API availability — pick by feature set and platform support in the table above.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between burnban and Flightdeck?

burnban is Free and open source, while Flightdeck is Free and open source. Compare pricing, free trial, API, platforms, and pros/cons in the table above on AIDiveForge.

Is burnban better than Flightdeck?

It depends on your workflow. Use the side-by-side attributes (pricing, open source, API, self-hosted, platforms) to decide. AIDiveForge does not rank a universal winner — we publish verified facts so you can choose.