Portkey vs Vercel AI Gateway (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
Developers who want managed multi-provider model access and spend controls, especially teams already on Vercel or the AI SDK
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
Vercel AI Gateway routes hundreds of models through one API key with zero token markup. Compare its pricing, features, pros and cons, and alternatives.
Starting Price
Free
Starting Price
$5
Free Trial
Yes
Free Trial
Yes
Free Version
Yes
Free Version
No
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 key for hundreds of models
- Provider and model fallbacks
- Request logs and spend dashboards
- Budgets by team, project, API key, or member
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
- No markup on tokens, including with BYOK
- Callable from any infrastructure, not only Vercel deployments
- Ordered provider and model fallbacks
Cons
- No output evaluation or quality scoring
- Free tier limited to a subset of models with lower rate limits
- Budgets don't cover BYOK spend, and failed BYOK requests fall back to billed system credentials
- Team-wide ZDR, custom reporting, and trace drains are paid add-ons
Portkey or Vercel AI — 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 Vercel AI if you wantChoose if you want
- Multi-provider model access for AI SDK apps
- Provider failover for production agents
- Capping AI spend by project or API key
- Routing coding agent spend through one account
Compare Portkey and Vercel AI Gateway 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.
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