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HELM

HELM (Holistic Evaluation of Language Models) is an Apache-2.0 framework from Stanford CRFM for reproducible, transparent evaluation of language models across many scenarios and metrics; it entered maintenance mode in June 2026.

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Introduction

HELM is an open-source Python framework created by Stanford’s Center for Research on Foundation Models for holistic, reproducible and transparent evaluation of foundation models. It underpins the public HELM leaderboards, which compare models across scenarios such as question answering, reasoning, safety and more.

Evaluations are defined as run specs combining scenarios, adapters and metrics, and results include raw requests and responses so anyone can inspect them. The framework supports many model providers and local models, and a web UI presents results.

The README notes HELM entered maintenance mode on 1 June 2026, so expect fixes rather than new features. In the quality loop it remains useful for reproducible, multi-metric model comparisons.

The source code is at stanford-crfm/helm on GitHub under the Apache-2.0 licence, with about 3,000 stars; the most recent commit was on 5 June 2026.

Features

  1. Scenario library: Many evaluation scenarios.
  2. Multi-metric: Accuracy, calibration, robustness, fairness and more.
  3. Reproducibility: Raw requests and responses saved.
  4. Providers: APIs and local models.
  5. Leaderboard UI: Browse results.
  6. Run specs: Configurable evaluations.

Pros

  1. Transparent: Full prompts and outputs are inspectable.
  2. Free to use: Open source under the Apache-2.0 licence, so the core tool costs nothing to use.
  3. Actively maintained: The repository had commits as recent as 5 June 2026.

Cons

  1. Maintenance mode: No major new development since June 2026.
  2. Heavy runs: Large suites are expensive.
  3. Model-level: Not for application testing.
pip install crfm-helm
helm-run --run-entries mmlu:subject=philosophy,model=openai/gpt2 --suite my-suite --max-eval-instances 10
helm-summarize --suite my-suite

Resources:

Pricing

HELM is free and open source under the Apache-2.0 licence.

  1. Researchers wanting transparent, multi-metric comparisons.

Conclusion

HELM set the standard for holistic model evaluation and still offers reproducible results.

Given maintenance mode, weigh it against actively developed harnesses.

On CheckOps, HELM is filed under the Release & CI gates stage. Related tools listed here include LM Evaluation Harness, Lighteval, OpenCompass, Inspect, OpenAI Evals and DeepEval. When comparing them, weigh the licence, the languages and platforms each supports, whether it is self-hosted or managed, and how cleanly it slots into your existing CI pipeline. Details on this page were checked against the official website, documentation and repository on 11 November 2026.

Alternatives

Other tools on CheckOps that cover similar ground. Open a page, or compare one with HELM side by side.