Portkey alternatives: 6 AI gateways compared (2026)
Blog post from Braintrust
Portkey is an OpenAI-compatible AI gateway that supports more than 1,600 models and combines routing, failover, caching, credential management, prompt versioning, observability, guardrails, and enterprise governance, but teams may seek alternatives because of log-based pricing and limited retention, hosted deployment and proxy-latency concerns, data residency requirements, and its May 2026 acquisition by Palo Alto Networks. Selecting a replacement requires assessing API and SDK compatibility, provider and feature coverage, caching, cost attribution, guardrails, self-hosting, RBAC, and whether production logs can support evaluations and release workflows. Braintrust Gateway emphasizes multi-provider routing linked to tracing, datasets, experiments, and CI evaluation; OpenRouter offers broad hosted model access; LiteLLM provides an open-source self-hosted proxy; Vercel AI Gateway targets Vercel-based applications; Kong AI Gateway extends existing API-management infrastructure; and Cloudflare AI Gateway supplies edge-based routing, security controls, and logging. A migration should inventory existing configurations, recreate credentials and access policies, translate routing and caching behavior, move prompts and guardrails, export required historical data, and test representative traffic before a staged cutover.
| Trend | Post Mentions | Total Month Mentions | Posts | Companies | MoM |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Observability | 8 | 3,175 | 737 | 186 | -24% |
| LLM | 6 | 5,068 | 1,020 | 229 | -34% |
| Real-time | 5 | 4,432 | 1,050 | 222 | -31% |
| Kubernetes | 3 | 3,490 | 385 | 112 | +26% |
| MCP | 3 | 8,729 | 854 | 211 | -20% |
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