Portkey vs Stainless (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 companies and developers building API clients
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
Powers the official SDKs for OpenAI, Anthropic, and others. The de facto gateway interface layer.
Starting Price
Free
Starting Price
$0Per month
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
- SDK generation
- API interface
- Type-safe clients
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
- Automates SDK dev
- Type-safe code
- Multi-language
Cons
- Requires OpenAPI
- Limited customization
Portkey or Stainless — 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 Stainless if you wantChoose if you want
Data not available
Compare Portkey and Stainless 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