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.
| Beam | Arize (Arize AI) | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Local-first activity monitor and pre-run scanner for AI coding agents. Early prototype. | 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, 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. | Not applicable — different category. |
| Blocking / enforcement | No. Beam observes and flags. It never allows or denies an action. | Not applicable — observability rather than endpoint enforcement. |
| Individual use | Runs locally for one person on one machine. Shared teams, fleet rollout and approvals are not built yet. | Phoenix free and open source; AX Pro from $50/month. |
| Deployment | A local collector plus a local interface. No MDM package, no central console, no SSO, no SOC 2, no SIEM forwarding. | Self-hosted Phoenix or hosted AX. |
| Source / licence | Not open source today. | Phoenix is open source; AX is commercial. |
| Pricing | Not published. | 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
- Beam observes and flags. It has no blocking or enforcement, so it cannot stop a destructive command.
- There is no MDM package, central console, SSO or SOC 2 report, so it is not ready for a managed fleet rollout.
- Scanning is heuristic pattern matching. It produces false positives, misses novel phrasing, and is not a guarantee of safety.
- Beam is early and has no published pricing. Every tool on this page is further along in at least one dimension.
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 also early: it does not block, has no console or SOC 2, and its scanning is heuristic.
See how Beam works
Beam is an early, local-first prototype. Read what it actually does today before comparing it further.