burnban vs Rifft

burnban and Rifft 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.

Rifft

Rifft is a passive debugging layer for production agent pipelines built on CrewAI, AutoGen, LangGraph, and similar frameworks. Drop in one import, wrap your entry point, and Rifft automatically captures handoffs, tool calls, and state mutations across every span. When a run fails, it walks the trace backwards to the first bad state — classifying the failure against the MAST taxonomy — and lets you replay from that exact handoff with patched inputs, without restarting the full crew. The side-by-side diff between the broken run and the fixed replay is where debugging time actually disappears. The ceiling arrives when your pipeline runs outside the supported frameworks or when you need on-premise trace storage.

Attribute	burnban	Rifft
Pricing	Free	Paid
Price	—	$49/month
Free trial	No	No
Open source	Yes	No
Has API	No	Yes
Self-hosted option	Yes	No
Platforms	macOS, Linux, Windows	—
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.	Backwards trace walking from error to root cause, so you identify the span that produced bad state instead of reading 12,000 tokens of log output in sequence. MAST failure classification across four categories, which means a handoff schema mismatch or a tool loop is recognized and labeled on first sight rather than diagnosed from scratch each time. Replay from any span with patched inputs — without rerunning the full crew from the start — so a fix hypothesis is confirmed in seconds rather than minutes of re-execution. Provider-agnostic instrumentation across seven-plus frameworks via a single import and decorator, so teams do not rewrite observability code when switching between CrewAI and LangGraph. Similar-run surfacing groups failures with prior runs that matched the same MAST class, so recurring agent bugs are visible as patterns before they accumulate into an incident.
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.	Traces are stored on Rifft's cloud infrastructure — there is no self-hosted deployment path, no installable container, and no on-premise option listed. Teams whose contracts prohibit external telemetry data or whose compliance frameworks require data residency switch to OpenTelemetry-compatible self-hosted stacks (Jaeger, Langfuse self-hosted) even when the debugging experience is materially worse. The MAST taxonomy covers four classified failure classes. Agent failure modes outside those classes — for example, semantic drift in long-running conversations, reward hacking in tool selection, or cross-session memory corruption — are captured as raw spans but receive no classification or pattern-matching, leaving the debugging experience identical to unstructured log review. Rifft is a passive observer: it captures what happens but does not add validation gates, schema enforcement, or retry logic to the pipeline. Teams that want to prevent the failure class — not just diagnose it after the fact — build guardrails separately, maintaining a second layer of tooling alongside Rifft.

Bottom line

Burnban is free while Rifft is paid; burnban is open source; only Rifft exposes a public API. Choose based on which difference matters most for your workflow.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between burnban and Rifft?

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

Is burnban better than Rifft?

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.

burnban vs Rifft: which should I pick?

Pick burnban if its pricing model, openness, or platform fit matches your constraints; pick Rifft otherwise. Check free-trial availability on each listing if you want to test before committing.

Comparison data is sourced and verified by the AIDiveForge data pipeline. AIDiveForge is editorially independent.