Lunary vs Portkey
Updated March 10, 2026
Overview
Lunary is an open-source LLM observability platform for monitoring AI applications in production. It provides request tracing, cost tracking, user analytics, and prompt management with a clean dashboard. Lunary can be self-hosted for data privacy and offers a managed cloud option.
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.
Strengths and tradeoffs
What each tool does well, and the limitations to keep in mind.
Pros
- Production-ready platform
- Good performance
- Active development
- Strong features
Cons
- Enterprise pricing varies
- Setup complexity
- Learning curve required
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
Compare Lunary 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 500+ models through one gateway.