Fiddler AI vs Portkey (2026)
Updated March 10, 2026
Overview
Fiddler AI is an enterprise platform for observing, evaluating, and governing AI agents and ML models, with guardrails that run in your own environment.
Portkey provides LLM observability alongside its gateway capabilities, offering detailed logging, metrics, and tracing for LLM API calls. Teams can monitor latency, costs, token usage, and error rates across providers, with request-level debugging and analytics dashboards for production AI applications.
Key features
Core capabilities each platform advertises.
- Agentic observability across multi-step agent workflows
- Continuous evaluations from testing through production
- Inline guardrails for PII, PHI, prompt injection, and jailbreaks
- AI governance, risk, and compliance reporting
Strengths and tradeoffs
What each tool does well, and the limitations to keep in mind.
Pros
- Covers AI agents and predictive ML models in one platform
- Evaluations and guardrails run in-environment, with no external LLM API call per check
- Free tier includes real-time guardrails
- Supports SaaS, VPC, on-premises, and AWS GovCloud deployment
Cons
- The free tier covers guardrails only; observability starts on the paid Developer plan
- VPC and on-premises deployment require the Enterprise plan
- Every plan on the pricing page starts with a demo request rather than self-serve signup
- No model routing or provider failover, so a gateway is a separate tool
Pros
- Enterprise-scale monitoring (10B requests/month)
- Sub-40ms overhead
- Comprehensive analytics and tracing
- Strong security certifications
Cons
- Professional tier expensive (USD 2-5k/mo)
- Open-source has limited features
- Complex for small teams
Fiddler AI or Portkey — which should you choose?
Choose Fiddler AI if you wantChoose if you want
- Governing AI agents in regulated industries
- Monitoring predictive ML models for drift and performance
- Redacting PII and PHI on agent requests and responses
Choose Portkey if you wantChoose if you want
Compare Fiddler AI and Portkey on your own traffic
Respan lets you trace LLM and agent calls across any model or framework, A/B test prompts on production traffic, and route requests across 1,000+ models through one gateway.
Try Respan free