Overview

Rating

10.0 / 10

Rating

Best For

Engineering teams who want a self-hosted, open-source LLM proxy for managing providers, keys, and budgets

Best For

Engineering teams that need a gateway with routing, caching, and guardrails for production LLM apps

Product Summary

LiteLLM is an open-source LLM gateway and Python SDK from BerriAI that puts 140+ providers behind one OpenAI-compatible API you host yourself.

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

Free

Starting Price

Free

Free Trial

Yes

Free Version

Yes

Free Version

Yes

Website

litellm.ai

Website

portkey.ai

Key features

Core capabilities each platform advertises.

LiteLLM

OpenAI-compatible proxy for 140+ providers
Virtual keys scoped to users and teams
Budgets, rate limits, and spend tracking
Fallbacks, retries, and load balancing
Guardrails for PII masking and prompt injection

Portkey

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.

LiteLLM

Pros

MIT-licensed proxy, free at any volume
140+ providers behind one OpenAI-compatible API
Virtual keys and budgets per user and team
Runs inside your own infrastructure

Cons

You run, scale, and secure the proxy yourself
Two PyPI releases were compromised in a March 2026 supply chain attack
SSO, RBAC, and audit logs require the Enterprise license
Tracing and evals depend on separate tools

Portkey

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

LiteLLM or Portkey — which should you choose?

Choose LiteLLM if you wantChoose if you want

Self-hosted LLM gateway for data control
Standardizing LLM access across teams
Budget enforcement per team or project
Switching providers without code changes
Issuing scoped API keys to internal users

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 LiteLLM 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

LiteLLM vs Portkey (2026)

Overview

Key features

Strengths and tradeoffs

LiteLLM or Portkey — which should you choose?

Compare LiteLLM and Portkey on your own traffic

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