Portkey vs Unify (2026)
Updated March 10, 2026
Overview
Portkey is an open-source AI gateway, now Palo Alto Networks' Prisma AIRS AI Gateway. Compare its pricing, features, pros and cons, and alternatives.
Unify provides intelligent LLM routing that automatically selects the optimal model and provider for each request based on quality, cost, and latency constraints. It benchmarks 100+ endpoints across providers and dynamically routes traffic to maximize performance while minimizing costs.
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
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
- Developer-friendly platform
- Production-ready
- Good performance
- Active development
Cons
- Enterprise pricing varies
- Setup complexity
- Learning curve
Portkey or Unify — 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 Unify if you wantChoose if you want
Compare Portkey and Unify 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 1,000+ models through one gateway.
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