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DeepEval vs Trulens

· 4 min read
Jeffrey Ip

TL;DR: TruLens offers useful tooling for basic LLM app monitoring and runtime feedback, but it’s still early-stage and lacks many core evaluation features — including agentic and conversational metrics, granular test control, and safety testing. DeepEval takes a more complete approach to LLM evaluation, supporting structured testing, CI/CD workflows, custom metrics, and integration with Confident AI for collaborative analysis, sharing, and decision-making across teams.

What Makes DeepEval Stand Out?​

1. Purpose-Built for Developers​

DeepEval is designed by engineers with roots at Google and AI researchers from Princeton — so naturally, it's built to slot right into an engineering workflow without sacrificing metric rigor.

Key developer-focused advantages include:

  • Seamless CI/CD integration via native pytest support
  • Composable metric modules for flexible pipeline design
  • Cleaner error messaging and fewer bugs
  • No vendor lock-in — works across LLMs and frameworks
  • Extendable abstractions built with reusable class structures
  • Readable, modifiable code that scales with your needs
  • Ecosystem ready — DeepEval is built to be built on

2. We Obsess Over Developer Experience​

From docs to DX, we sweat the details. Whether it's refining error handling or breaking off red teaming into a separate package (deepteam), we're constantly iterating based on what you need.

Every Discord question is an opportunity to improve the product. If the docs don’t have an answer, that’s our cue to fix it.

3. The Community is Active (and Always On)​

We're always around — literally. The team hangs out in the DeepEval Discord voice chat while working (yes, even if muted). It makes us accessible, and users feel more comfortable jumping in and asking for help. It’s part of our culture.

4. Fast Releases, Fast Fixes​

Most issues reported in Discord are resolved in under 3 days. If it takes longer, we communicate — and we prioritize.

When something clearly helps our users, we move fast. For instance, we shipped the full DAG metric — code, tests, and docs — in under a week.

5. More Features, Fewer Bugs​

Because our foundation is engineering-first, you get a broader feature set with fewer issues. We aim for graceful error handling and smooth dev experience, so you're not left guessing when something goes wrong.

Comparison tables below will show what you get with DeepEval out of the box.

6. Scales with Your Org​

DeepEval works out of the box for teams — no extra setup needed. It integrates automatically with Confident AI, our dashboard for visualizing and sharing LLM evaluation results.

Without writing any additional code, you can:

  • Visualize score distributions and trends
  • Generate and share test reports internally or externally
  • Export results to CSV or JSON
  • Run regression tests for safe deployment
  • Compare prompts, models, or changes side-by-side
  • Manage and reuse centralized datasets

For safety-focused teams, DeepTeam (our red teaming toolkit) plugs right in. DeepEval is an ecosystem — not a dead end.

Comparing DeepEval and Trulens​

If you're reading this, there's a good chance you're in academia. Trulens was founded by Stanford professors and got really popular back in late 2023 and early 2024 through a DeepLearning course with Andrew Ng. However the traction slowly died after this initial boost, especially after the Snowflake acquisition.

And so, you'll find DeepEval provides a lot more well-rounded features and support for all different use cases (RAG, agentic, conversations), and completes all parts of the evaluation workflow (dataset generation, benchmarking, platform integration, etc.).

Metrics​

DeepEval does RAG evaluation very well, but it doesn't end there.

DeepEval
Trulens
RAG metrics
The popular RAG metrics such as faithfulness
yes
yes
Conversational metrics
Evaluates LLM chatbot conversationals
yes
no
Agentic metrics
Evaluates agentic workflows, tool use
yes
no
Red teaming metrics
Metrics for LLM safety and security like bias, PII leakage
yes
no
Multi-modal metrics
Metrics involving image generations as well
yes
no
Use case specific metrics
Summarization, JSON correctness, etc.
yes
no
Custom, research-backed metrics
Custom metrics builder should have research-backing
yes
no
Custom, deterministic metrics
Custom, LLM powered decision-based metrics
yes
no
Fully customizable metrics
Use existing metric templates for full customization
yes
no
Explanability
Metric provides reasons for all runs
yes
no
Run using any LLM judge
Not vendor-locked into any framework for LLM providers
yes
no
JSON-confineable
Custom LLM judges can be forced to output valid JSON for metrics
yes
no
Verbose debugging
Debug LLM thinking processes during evaluation
yes
no
Caching
Optionally save metric scores to avoid re-computation
yes
no
Cost tracking
Track LLM judge token usage cost for each metric run
yes
no
Integrates with Confident AI
Custom metrics or not, whether it can be on the cloud
yes
no

Dataset Generation​

DeepEval offers a comprehensive synthetic data generator while Trulens does not have any generation capabilities.

DeepEval
Trulens
Generate from documents
Synthesize goldens that are grounded in documents
yes
no
Generate from ground truth
Synthesize goldens that are grounded in context
yes
no
Generate free form goldens
Synthesize goldens that are not grounded
yes
no
Quality filtering
Remove goldens that do not meet the quality standards
yes
no
Non vendor-lockin
No Langchain, LlamaIndex, etc. required
yes
no
Customize language
Generate in français, español, deutsch, italiano, 日本語, etc.
yes
no
Customize output format
Generate SQL, code, etc. not just simple QA
yes
no
Supports any LLMs
Generate using any LLMs, with JSON confinement
yes
no
Save generations to Confident AI
Not just generate, but bring it to your organization
yes
no

Red teaming​

Trulens offers no red teaming at all, so only DeepEval will help you as you scale to safety and security LLM testing.

DeepEval
Trulens
Predefined vulnerabilities
Vulnerabilities such as bias, toxicity, misinformation, etc.
yes
no
Attack simulation
Simulate adversarial attacks to expose vulnerabilities
yes
no
Single-turn attack methods
Prompt injection, ROT-13, leetspeak, etc.
yes
no
Multi-turn attack methods
Linear jailbreaking, tree jailbreaking, etc.
yes
no
Data privacy metrics
PII leakage, prompt leakage, etc.
yes
no
Responsible AI metrics
Bias, toxicity, fairness, etc.
yes
no
Unauthorized access metrics
RBAC, SSRF, shell injection, sql injection, etc.
yes
no
Brand image metrics
Misinformation, IP infringement, robustness, etc.
yes
no
Illegal risks metrics
Illegal activity, graphic content, peronsal safety, etc.
yes
no
OWASP Top 10 for LLMs
Follows industry guidelines and standards
yes
no

Checkout DeepTeam's documentation, which powers DeepEval's red teaming capabilities, for more detail.

Benchmarks​

In the past, benchmarking foundational models were compute-heavy and messy. Now with DeepEval, 10 lines of code is all that is needed.

DeepEval
Trulens
MMLU
Vulnerabilities such as bias, toxicity, misinformation, etc.
yes
no
HellaSwag
Vulnerabilities such as bias, toxicity, misinformation, etc.
yes
no
Big-Bench Hard
Vulnerabilities such as bias, toxicity, misinformation, etc.
yes
no
DROP
Vulnerabilities such as bias, toxicity, misinformation, etc.
yes
no
TruthfulQA
Vulnerabilities such as bias, toxicity, misinformation, etc.
yes
no
HellaSwag
Vulnerabilities such as bias, toxicity, misinformation, etc.
yes
no

This is not the entire list (DeepEval has 15 benchmarks and counting), and Trulens offers no benchmarks at all.

Integrations​

DeepEval offers countless integrations with the tools you are likely already building with.

DeepEval
Trulens
Pytest
First-class integration with Pytest for testing in CI/CD
yes
no
LangChain & LangGraph
Run evals within the Lang ecosystem, or apps built with it
yes
yes
LlamaIndex
Run evals within the LlamaIndex ecosystem, or apps built with it
yes
yes
Hugging Face
Run evals during fine-tuning/training of models
yes
no
ChromaDB
Run evals on RAG pipelines built on Chroma
yes
no
Weaviate
Run evals on RAG pipelines built on Weaviate
yes
no
Elastic
Run evals on RAG pipelines built on Elastic
yes
no
QDrant
Run evals on RAG pipelines built on Qdrant
yes
no
PGVector
Run evals on RAG pipelines built on PGVector
yes
no
Snowflake
Integrated with Snowflake logs
no
yes
Confident AI
Integrated with Confident AI
yes
no

Platform​

DeepEval's platform is called Confident AI, and Trulen's platform is hidden and minimal.

DeepEval
Trulens
Sharable testing reports
Comprehensive reports that can be shared with stakeholders
yes
no
A|B regression testing
Determine any breaking changes before deployment
yes
no
Prompts and models experimentation
Figure out which prompts and models work best
yes
no
Dataset editor
Domain experts can edit datasets on the cloud
yes
no
Dataset revision history & backups
Point in time recovery, edit history, etc.
yes
no
Metric score analysis
Score distributions, mean, median, standard deviation, etc.
yes
no
Metric annotation
Annotate the correctness of each metric
yes
no
Metric validation
False positives, false negatives, confusion matrices, etc.
yes
no
Prompt versioning
Edit and manage prompts on the cloud instead of CSV
yes
no
Metrics on the cloud
Run metrics on the platform instead of locally
yes
no
Trigger evals via HTTPs
For users that are using (java/type)script
yes
no
Trigger evals without code
For stakeholders that are non-technical
yes
no
Alerts and notifications
Pings your slack, teams, discord, after each evaluation run.
yes
no
LLM observability & tracing
Monitor LLM interactions in production
yes
no
Online metrics in production
Continuously monitor LLM performance
yes
no
Human feedback collection
Collect feedback from internal team members or end users
yes
yes
LLM guardrails
Ultra-low latency guardrails in production
yes
no
LLM red teaming
Managed LLM safety testing and attack curation
yes
no
Self-hosting
On-prem deployment so nothing leaves your data center
yes
yes
SSO
Authenticate with your Idp of choice
yes
no
User roles & permissions
Custom roles, permissions, data segregation for different teams
yes
no
Transparent pricing
Pricing should be available on the website
yes
no
HIPAA-ready
For companies in the healthcare indudstry
yes
no
SOCII certification
For companies that need additional security compliance
yes
no

Confident AI is also self-served, meaning you don't have to talk to us to try it out. Sign up here.

Conclusion​

DeepEval offers much more features and better community, and should be more than enough to support all your LLM evaluation needs. Get started with DeepEval here.