Updated March 10, 2026
Phoenix is an open-source LLM observability and evaluation platform from Arize AI. It supports OpenTelemetry-based tracing across LLM and agent applications, with built-in evaluators, dataset management, and prompt playgrounds. Phoenix can be self-hosted with Docker or run via the Arize-hosted cloud version.
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.
Core capabilities each platform advertises.
What each tool does well, and the limitations to keep in mind.
Pros
Cons
Pros
Cons
Choose Phoenix if you wantChoose if you want
Choose Portkey if you wantChoose if you want
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.
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