Portkey — LLM Gateways Platform

Founded 2023|San Francisco, California|11-50 people|Freemium

What is Portkey?

Portkey is an AI gateway and control panel trusted by thousands of development teams worldwide, providing comprehensive infrastructure for production AI applications. The platform processes over 10 billion LLM requests monthly with 99.9999% uptime and sub-40ms latency. Portkey's suite includes AI Gateway, Guardrails, Observability, and Prompt Management, routing requests to 1600+ models across major providers through a unified interface. Users praise easy integration, intuitive dashboards, dedicated support, and analytics providing detailed insights into traces, errors, caching, and cost visibility. However, real-world deployments often experience 20-40ms latency overhead (higher than claimed), with Kong benchmarks showing competitors 228% faster. Pricing typically ranges USD 2,000-10,000+ monthly depending on volume and deployment model. While powerful for enterprises, the platform can be overwhelming for new users and may require separate tools for comprehensive MLOps capabilities.

Key features

Core capabilities this platform advertises.

AI gateway with 200+ models
Automatic retries and fallbacks
Semantic caching
Guardrails and content filtering
Detailed cost and latency analytics

Strengths and tradeoffs

What this tool does well, and the limitations to keep in mind.

Pros

Massive scale—10B requests monthly with 99.9999% uptime
Comprehensive observability and analytics
Dedicated support even during POC phase
Strong security certifications (SOC2, ISO27001)

Cons

Real-world latency (20-40ms) higher than claimed
Benchmarks show competitors 228% faster
Complex feature set overwhelming for new users
High pricing for smaller teams

Plans & pricing

What's included in each plan, and how the tiers compare.

Self-Hosted

Perpetual

Open-source gateway
Infrastructure costs only
Full control
Community support

Professional

$2,000-5,000

Per month

Managed infrastructure
Standard support
Advanced observability
Prompt management

Enterprise

$10,000+

Per month

RBAC, SSO
Private cloud/VPC
Data isolation
SOC2, ISO27001
24/7 priority support
Custom SLAs

View official pricing page

Common use cases

Engineering teams who need a reliable, observable gateway for production LLM applications

Enterprise LLM deployment with reliability
Multi-provider failover and load balancing
Cost reduction through semantic caching
Implementing safety guardrails in production
Centralized LLM access management

Using Portkey with Respan

Integrate Portkey's enterprise AI gateway with Respan to add comprehensive observability and control to your AI applications. Route across 1600+ models with guardrails, caching, and cost optimization. With Respan and Portkey together, build production-grade AI systems with enterprise reliability and visibility.