Is Arize Phoenix free?
Yes, Phoenix is open source. The commercial Arize AX Pro tier starts at $50/month.
Beam vs ARIZE AI
Beam vs Arize
Arize offers Phoenix as an open-source LLM observability tool and Arize AX commercially from $50 a month, aimed at production AI applications. The overlap with Beam is limited to agent-step and spend visibility. Beam is a local security monitor for coding agents with heuristic pre-run scanning.
Beam vs Arize, side by side
Details below are drawn from a September 2026 review of the AI agent security market. Some figures are vendor-sourced or analyst estimates, and this is a fast-moving space — check with each vendor before you buy. Composio details come from its own pricing and documentation pages as of October 2026.
| Beam | Arize (Arize AI) | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Local-first activity monitor, policy enforcement, and pre-run scanner for AI coding agents, with a Sentinel browser extension for AI chats. | LLM observability with an open-source component (Phoenix) and a commercial tier (AX). |
| Monitoring | Shell commands, file changes, tool calls, network endpoints and browser actions from harnesses such as Claude Code, Codex and Cursor, plus Beam Sentinel checks on supported AI chat sites before send. Normalised into local NDJSON with risk flags and evidence attached. | Traces, agent steps, evaluation and token spend for production AI applications. |
| Skill / MCP scanning | Yes. SKILL.md files and MCP configurations are scanned before you run them, using 11 heuristic patterns plus an MCP version-pin check. Workspace admins can also block an MCP server for the org or one user. | Not applicable — different category. |
| Blocking / enforcement | Yes. Workspace owners and admins set observe, advisory, or enforce policy. Enforce denies matching tool calls on Claude Code and Codex PreToolUse hooks. The Sentinel Chrome extension pauses or blocks high-risk browser sends and can hold a send after redacting live secrets. | Not applicable — observability rather than endpoint enforcement. |
| Individual use | Free for up to 3 people, and Pro for one person at $8/month. Team workspaces add owner/admin roles, org baselines, stricter member overrides and a control plane. | Phoenix free and open source; AX Pro from $50/month. |
| Deployment | Local collector plus a workspace dashboard. Apple and Windows MDM. Sentinel Chrome extension for browser AI chats. Licensed self-hosted control plane for teams that need it on their own infrastructure. | Self-hosted Phoenix or hosted AX. |
| Source / licence | AGPL-3.0 for the local CLI and collector; the multi-user control plane is proprietary. | Phoenix is open source; AX is commercial. |
| Pricing | Free for up to 3 people. Pro $8/month for one person. Team $20 per developer and $5 per browser seat a month, billed yearly. | Phoenix is open source; Arize AX Pro from $50/month. |
Arize in numbers
As reported in our source research. Some figures are estimates.
- Open source
- Arize Phoenix
- Commercial
- Arize AX Pro from $50/month
- Aimed at
- Production AI applications
Where Arize does more
- A free open-source path (Phoenix) plus a commercial tier, with published pricing.
- Purpose-built evaluation and observability for production AI systems.
- Established in the ML observability market well before agent security became a category.
Where Beam differs
- Beam records what an agent did on a machine, not how a model performed in an application.
- Beam scans skill files and MCP configurations before you run them.
- Beam is local-first: nothing leaves the machine by default and credentials are redacted before writing.
Beam’s current gaps
- Enforce is hook-based: a native deny is wired for Claude Code and Codex PreToolUse. Cursor, Copilot CLI and Gemini currently get a deny note, not a verified block.
- Missing, unreadable or expired cached policy allows the action. Beam is not a fail-closed kernel sandbox or an in-silicon watchdog.
- Scanning is heuristic pattern matching. It produces false positives, misses novel phrasing, and is not a guarantee of safety.
- There is no SOC 2 report and no default SIEM forwarder. Kernel isolation like OpenShell remains a different layer.
Which one fits
If you need to evaluate and observe a production AI system, Arize is the right fit and Phoenix costs nothing to try. Beam answers a security question on a developer endpoint instead.
FAQ
Does Arize overlap with Beam?
Only on agent-step and token-spend visibility. Arize is aimed at production AI applications; Beam at local coding-agent activity and pre-run scanning.
Which should a security team pick?
They solve different problems. Beam is a coding-agent control layer with workspace policy and Sentinel; it has no SOC 2 report, and its scanning is heuristic. Arize is production-AI observability.
See how Beam works
Beam is an early, local-first prototype. Read what it actually does today before comparing it further.