Portkey
The AI Gateway for Reliable, Fast & Secure AI Apps
About Portkey
Portkey is a unified AI gateway and control plane that lets developers route requests to 1,600+ LLMs from 60+ providers through a single API. It provides production-grade infrastructure with built-in observability, guardrails, caching, fallbacks, and load balancing — used by 24,000+ organizations processing 120M daily requests.
Pros & Cons
Pros
- Drop-in replacement for OpenAI SDK — takes 2 minutes to set up with minimal code changes
- Switch between 60+ providers and 1,600+ models without changing application code
- 99.99% uptime with automatic fallbacks, retries, and circuit breakers built-in
- Comprehensive observability with detailed logging and tracing for every LLM call
- Open-source gateway core (10.8K GitHub stars) can be self-hosted
- Low latency overhead — edge worker architecture adds only 20-40ms
Cons
- Advanced features like guardrails and conditional routing have a steep learning curve
- Detailed pricing tiers are not easily accessible on the website
- Introduces an additional dependency layer between your app and LLM providers
- Focused exclusively on language model orchestration — not useful for broader ML pipelines
Key Features
Universal AI Gateway
Route requests to 1,600+ models from 60+ providers through a single REST API and SDK
Automatic Fallbacks & Retries
Switch to alternate providers on failure with configurable retry logic and circuit breakers
AI Guardrails
40+ pre-built guardrails for input/output validation including prompt injection detection and PII filtering
Observability & Analytics
Full logging of multimodal requests with distributed tracing and 21+ key metrics, OpenTelemetry-compliant
Smart Caching
Simple and semantic caching layers that reduce costs and decrease latency for repeated queries
Load Balancing
Distribute requests across multiple API keys and providers with conditional routing rules
Budget & Rate Limits
Spending caps based on cost or token consumption with configurable rate limits
Enterprise Security
SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, GDPR compliant with AES-256 encryption and RBAC
Pricing
- 10,000 requests/month
- Core gateway features
- Community support
- Basic logging
- 100,000 requests/month
- Advanced analytics
- Guardrails
- Priority support
- Team collaboration
- Unlimited requests
- SSO/SAML
- HIPAA BAA
- SLA guarantees
- Dedicated infrastructure
- Custom contracts
Best For
Multi-Provider LLM Orchestration
Unify calls to multiple AI providers through a single API for simplified management and seamless switching
Production AI Reliability
Add automatic fallbacks and circuit breakers to ensure AI features stay online during provider outages
AI Cost Optimization
Use smart caching, budget limits, and load balancing to reduce LLM API spend
AI Safety & Compliance
Deploy guardrails for prompt injection prevention, PII detection, and output validation in regulated industries
AI Agent Infrastructure
Reliable backbone for autonomous AI agents with full observability across multi-step interactions
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Featured In
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Best for platform teams running multi-model production systems who want continuous model comparison as part of their infrastructure. The gateway approach turns model evaluation from a one-time exercise into an ongoing optimization.
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