Portkey vs Respan (2026)
Updated March 10, 2026
vs
Overview
Rating
10.0 / 10
Rating
10.0 / 10
Best For
Engineering teams that need a gateway with routing, caching, and guardrails for production LLM apps
Best For
AI engineering teams building production LLM applications who need unified access, observability, and cost control
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.
Product Summary
Respan is the AI router with built-in observability and automated evals: one API for 1,000+ models, with tracing, spend control, and evals on every request.
Starting Price
Free
Starting Price
$0
Free Trial
Yes
Free Trial
Yes
Free Version
Yes
Free Version
Yes
Website
Website
Key features
Core capabilities each platform advertises.
- 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
- One API for 1,000+ models
- Automatic fallbacks and retries
- Load balancing across providers and models
- Exact-match caching with configurable TTL
- Hard spend limits per key, per customer, or org-wide
- Task-aware model routing with Respan Router (beta)
- Tracing, evals, and prompt management on every routed request
Strengths and tradeoffs
What each tool does well, and the limitations to keep in mind.
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
Pros
- Gateway, tracing, and evals in one platform, so every metric ties back to the request behind it
- 1,000+ models through one OpenAI-compatible API
- No processing fee on Respan credits, and provider discounts are passed straight through
- Hard spend caps that block requests, not just alert
- Unlimited seats on the free plan
- SOC 2, HIPAA with a BAA, GDPR, and ISO 27001
Cons
- Additional latency (30-40ms) from routing through a gateway layer
- Newer platform with smaller community compared to established tools
- Some advanced provider-specific features may not be fully supported
Portkey or Respan — which should you choose?
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
Choose Respan if you wantChoose if you want
- Keeping agents online through provider outages and rate limits
- Controlling LLM spend per customer or API key
- Switching models without code changes
- Scoring output quality on live production traffic
- Replacing a separate gateway, logging tool, and eval tool with one platform