Helicone vs Portkey (2026)
Updated March 10, 2026
Overview
Helicone is an open-source LLM observability and proxy platform. By adding a single line of code, developers get request logging, cost tracking, caching, rate limiting, and analytics for their LLM applications. Helicone supports all major LLM providers and can function as both a gateway proxy and a logging-only integration.
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.
- LLM observability and monitoring
- Cost tracking and analytics
- Request caching
- Rate limiting and user management
- Open-source with managed option
- 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
- Extremely simple integration (one line of code)
- Open-source with self-hosting option
- Generous free tier (100k requests)
- Supports all major LLM providers
Cons
- Advanced features require paid tiers
- Data retention limited on free tier
- Self-hosting requires technical expertise
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
Helicone or Portkey — which should you choose?
Choose Helicone if you wantChoose if you want
- LLM cost monitoring and optimization
- Production request debugging
- User-level usage tracking and rate limiting
- Caching to reduce latency and cost
- Team-wide LLM spend management
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 Helicone and Portkey on your own traffic
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