Apigee AI Gateway vs Portkey (2026)
Updated March 10, 2026
Overview
Google Cloud's Apigee includes AI gateway capabilities for managing and securing generative AI API traffic, with model routing, token-based rate limiting, content moderation, and comprehensive analytics.
Portkey is an open-source AI gateway, now Palo Alto Networks' Prisma AIRS AI Gateway. Compare its pricing, features, pros and cons, and alternatives.
Key features
Core capabilities each platform advertises.
- Google Cloud AI traffic management
- API analytics and monitoring
- Security and threat protection
- Rate limiting and quotas
- Multi-cloud support
- Unified API across major providers
- Retries, fallbacks, and load balancing
- Simple and semantic caching
- Deterministic and LLM guardrails
- Request logs with cost and latency analytics
Strengths and tradeoffs
What each tool does well, and the limitations to keep in mind.
Pros
- Production-ready
- Good performance
- Active development
Cons
- Pricing varies
- Setup required
Pros
- Open-source, self-hostable gateway
- Routing, caching, and guardrails in one gateway
- Requests keep flowing past the free log limit
- RBAC and semantic caching on the $49 Production plan
Cons
- Now part of Palo Alto Networks as Prisma AIRS AI Gateway
- Three-day log retention on the free plan
- Requests past the log cap go unrecorded on the free plan
- Semantic caching and LLM guardrails require Production
Apigee AI or Portkey — which should you choose?
Choose Apigee AI if you wantChoose if you want
- Managing AI APIs on Google Cloud
- Enterprise API security for AI endpoints
- Usage metering and billing for AI services
- Multi-cloud AI API management
- Compliance and governance for AI traffic
Choose Portkey if you wantChoose if you want
- Multi-provider failover and load balancing
- Cutting cost through caching
- Guardrails on production traffic
- Centralized LLM access management
Compare Apigee AI Gateway and Portkey on your own traffic
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