Kong AI Gateway vs Portkey (2026)
Updated March 10, 2026
vs
Overview
Rating
10.0 / 10
Rating
10.0 / 10
Best For
Enterprises using Kong who want to extend their API gateway with AI capabilities
Best For
Engineering teams that need a gateway with routing, caching, and guardrails for production LLM apps
Product Summary
Kong AI Gateway extends the popular Kong API gateway with AI-specific capabilities including multi-LLM routing, prompt engineering, semantic caching, rate limiting, and cost management.
Product Summary
Portkey is an open-source AI gateway, now Palo Alto Networks' Prisma AIRS AI Gateway. Compare its pricing, features, pros and cons, and alternatives.
Starting Price
$0Per month
Starting Price
Free
Free Trial
Yes
Free Trial
Yes
Free Version
Yes
Free Version
Yes
Website
Website
Key features
Core capabilities each platform advertises.
- AI traffic management
- Multi-LLM load balancing
- Request/response transformation
- Authentication and authorization
- Plugin ecosystem
- 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
- Developer-friendly platform
- Production-ready
- Good performance
- Active development
Cons
- Enterprise pricing varies
- Setup complexity
- Learning curve
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
Kong AI or Portkey — which should you choose?
Choose Kong AI if you wantChoose if you want
- Enterprise AI API management
- Load balancing across LLM providers
- AI traffic governance and security
- Multi-tenant AI access control
- API lifecycle management for AI
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 Kong AI Gateway and Portkey on your own traffic
10KFree traces/mo
1,000+Models
5 minSetup
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