OpenRouter vs Portkey (2026)
Updated April 29, 2026
Overview
OpenRouter is an LLM gateway with one OpenAI-compatible API for 500+ models from 80+ providers, billed at provider rates plus a platform fee.
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.
- One OpenAI-compatible API for 500+ models from 80+ providers
- Auto-routing across providers
- Budgets and management API keys
- Prompt caching
- Bring your own keys, fee-free up to $25,000 a month
- 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
- One key and one bill across 80+ providers
- Model calls billed at provider rates
- Free plan for prototyping on free models
- BYOK fee-free up to $25,000 of list-price inference a month
- Broadcast sends request traces to tools like Langfuse and Datadog
Cons
- Platform fee of 5.5% on Standard and 8% on Business, with a $0.80 minimum on card purchases
- Doesn't score or evaluate outputs, so quality checks happen in another tool
- Credits may be expired one year after purchase
- Free plan capped at 50 requests a day until you've bought $10 in credits
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
OpenRouter or Portkey — which should you choose?
Choose OpenRouter if you wantChoose if you want
- Building model-agnostic apps that switch providers freely
- Accessing many providers with one key and one bill
- Comparing models side by side from a single API
- Tracking spend per API key
- Prototyping on free models
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 the models
How OpenRouter's and Portkey's models score on public benchmarks, and their live API status.
Compare OpenRouter and Portkey on your own traffic
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