LiteLLM vs Portkey (2026)
Updated March 10, 2026
vs
Overview
Rating
10.0 / 10
Rating
10.0 / 10
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
No
Free Trial
Yes
Free Version
Yes
Free Version
Yes
Website
Website
Key features
Core capabilities each platform advertises.
- 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
- 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
- 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
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
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