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LiteLLM vs Portkey: Open-Source Gateway or Governed Platform?

LiteLLM gives free key budgets in a proxy you run; Portkey, now part of Palo Alto Networks, hosts observability for you. Team accounts, a monthly bill at one workload, licensing, budgets, and hosting compared.

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28 cited
In this piece

GILD verdict

Pick LiteLLM to keep budgets, keys and logs in your own infrastructure with no license cost, as Okta and Zalando do.

At 1 million Sonnet 5.5 requests a month it costs about US$106 less than Portkey's Production plan before staff time. Check first that SSO and organization management fit the free tier, the gap that sent a TU Vienna team to build its own. Portkey is the better choice when hosted observability and Palo Alto Networks' security platform matter more than running the gateway yourself. Ask Palo Alto Networks how long Portkey's self-serve plans stay on their current terms. Do not self-host the open-source gateway while it merges no fixes and its July 2026 SSRF bypass stays open.

Teams that rejected both name the same gap: a TU Vienna team found LiteLLM's proxy and Portkey locking SSO, organization management or observability behind enterprise plans, and built its own gateway on LiteLLM's library (Jul 2025). On the hosted side, a Portkey caching change took a production platform down for all its customers in July 2025, and Glama now maintains its own fork of Portkey's open-source gateway, which has merged no pull request since May 26, 2026. On GILD's workload of 1 million Claude Sonnet 5.5 requests a month, LiteLLM costs US$4,024 on one self-run VM and Portkey's Production plan US$4,130 with every request logged. Palo Alto Networks closed its purchase of Portkey on May 29, 2026 and sells it as Prisma AIRS AI Gateway.

What teams report

Failures and incidents 1

  1. A platform on Portkey cloudOn Portkey

    On Portkey's hosted cloud, a Portkey caching change live from 19:41 UTC on July 22, 2025 made one platform's simple cache match similar requests and took its platform down for all customers; Portkey called it a cache-collision bug and reverted it at 03:23 UTC on July 23.

    “This caused a complete platform failure while all customers were actively using the system.”
    Leonardo Marciano, CTO, as his GitHub profile describes himself, A platform on Portkey cloudGitHub (Portkey-AI/gateway), , post

Left or turned down 1

  1. TU Vienna

    Announcing Aqueduct, the competing open-source gateway it built on the LiteLLM Router SDK, a small TU Vienna team serving university researchers wrote that it had rejected LiteLLM's proxy, Portkey and Kong because each locked SSO, organization management, observability or self-hosting behind enterprise plans (Jul 1, 2025).

    “Every AI gateway we looked at (LiteLLM, Portkey, Kong, etc.) locked critical features like SSO, organization management, observability, or self-hosting behind enterprise plans.”
    meffmadd, Member of the TU Vienna team and author of Aqueduct, a competing gateway, TU ViennaHacker News, , post

Switched 1

  1. GlamaOn Portkey

    Glama's founder pointed Portkey users to Lightport, Glama's actively maintained fork of Portkey's gateway, which fixed bugs and stripped guardrails, fallbacks, automatic retries and load balancing (Jul 18, 2026).

    “…in case anyone is looking for an actively maintained fork of Portkey…”
    punkpeye, Glama founder, maintainer of Lightport, a competing fork, GlamaGitHub (Portkey-AI/gateway), , post

Adopted 2

  1. OktaOn LiteLLM

    Okta runs a LiteLLM gateway in its private cloud as the single entry point for every employee and developer AI call, logging each interaction for its security team (Feb 26, 2026).

    “Our gateway is a resilient, scalable service powered by LiteLLM, deployed within Okta's secure private cloud. It functions as a secure proxy and a single point of entry for every AI interaction, from a developer calling a code-generation API to an employee using our internal webUI.”
    Dennis Henry, Productivity Architect, OktaOkta blog, , write-up

  2. PfizerOn LiteLLM

    Pfizer runs a self-hosted LiteLLM gateway for every team, application and agent, and its CI load tests caught a release that cut throughput about 48% with no HTTP errors (LiteLLM blog, Sep 11, 2026).

    “…serving every team, application, and agent at Pfizer with uniform access to external and self-hosted models.”
    Ishaan Jaffer and Krrish Dholakia, with Pfizer AI Platform Engineering, LiteLLM co-founders writing with Pfizer's platform team, PfizerLiteLLM blog, , write-upVendor customer story

Choosing between LiteLLM and Portkey

Choose LiteLLM if

  • You want budgets and rate limits per key, user, and team without buying an Enterprise plan.
  • All traffic and logs must stay in your own infrastructure, including the control plane.
  • You want to keep the gateway independent of a security vendor's platform.
  • You want one company gateway inside your own network that logs every call, as Okta and Zalando run.

Choose Portkey if

  • You want hosted request logs, traces, and alerts without running a logging stack, priced by recorded logs.
  • You want gateway guardrails tied to Prisma AIRS runtime security, now that Portkey ships as Palo Alto Networks' Prisma AIRS AI Gateway.
  • You want a hybrid setup where the data plane runs in your VPC and Portkey runs the control plane.

Side by side

DimensionLiteLLMPortkey
PlansList prices in US dollars. Portkey counts recorded logs; requests past a plan's log limit still run.Open source US$0 to self-host, with no per-token fee; Enterprise is an annual license quoted by gateway request capacity, deployment architecture, and support needs, never per tokenLegacy portkey.ai plans: Developer free with 10,000 recorded logs a month; Production US$49 a month with 100,000, then US$9 per 100,000 up to 3 million; Enterprise custom. Palo Alto Networks publishes no Prisma AIRS AI Gateway price
Monthly bill at one workloadGILD's calculation from published rates, fetched Oct 28, 2026: 1 million requests a month, each with 1,000 input and 200 output tokens on Claude Sonnet 5.5 at US$2 and US$10 per million tokens, no caching, every request logged, 30-day log retention. The LiteLLM line has no high availability, Enterprise license, support or engineer time. Taxes are excluded.US$4,024 a month: US$4,000 of Claude Sonnet 5.5 tokens at Anthropic's list price plus US$24 for one 2-vCPU, 4-GiB VM running the gateway, Postgres and Redis12728US$4,130 a month on Production: the same US$4,000 of tokens billed by the provider plus US$49 for the first 100,000 recorded logs and nine more blocks of 100,000 at US$9; US$4,024 self-hosting the open-source gateway on the same VM928
Reliability teams reportA June 2026 upgrade stopped FutureSearch's usage billing for 6.5 days without an error; Zalando restarts its proxy every 20,000 requests over memory leaks (Aug 2026); per-team keys get messy past a handful of teams (Reddit, Jun 2026)232425A Portkey caching change live from July 22 to July 23, 2025 took a production platform down for all its customers; a gateway user reported occasional errors likely related to connection health in production traffic that did not reproduce locally (Sep 2025); Glama maintains its own fork, Lightport (Jul 2026)192021
Open sourceMIT license for everything outside the repository's enterprise directory, which needs a paid license in productionMIT-licensed gateway with its last push on May 25, 2026 and no pull request merged since May 26, 2026; last release v1.15.2 (January 12, 2026); the Gateway 2.0 pre-release branch idle since March 14, 2026; an SSRF allowlist bypass disclosed publicly on July 3, 2026 remains unpatched
Key budgetsBudgets and RPM and TPM limits per key, user, team, and organization in open source, enforced against a Postgres database; tag budgets, soft budget alerts, and temporary increases need EnterpriseCost or token budgets and rate limits on API keys, on the Enterprise plan and for select Pro customers
HostingSelf-hosted only in your cloud or data center, from Docker images, a Helm chart, or Terraform modules; air-gapped deployments on EnterprisePortkey cloud; a hybrid Enterprise setup with the data plane in your VPC and Portkey's control plane; private cloud on Enterprise; or the open-source gateway on your own servers
ObservabilitySpend logs per request, usage views in the Admin UI, Prometheus metrics, and logging callbacks to Langfuse, LangSmith, and othersLogs, traces, feedback, and filters on every plan; alerts from Production; log retention 3 days on Developer and 30 days on Production
GuardrailsCustom guardrails and Presidio PII masking in open source; Lakera, Aporia, LlamaGuard, and several other integrations need EnterpriseDeterministic guardrails on Developer; LLM and partner guardrails from Production; custom guardrail hooks on Enterprise
Single sign-onSSO free for up to 5 users from v1.76.0; beyond that, and SCIM, audit logs, and secret managers, an Enterprise licenseRole-based access control from Production; SSO with providers such as Okta and Microsoft on Enterprise
ComplianceSOC 2 Type II audited, with the updated report published September 8, 2026SOC 2 Type 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, and HIPAA, with custom BAAs on Enterprise
OwnershipBerriAI, a Y Combinator W23 companyPalo Alto Networks, which closed the acquisition on May 29, 2026 for US$117 million, per its 10-K, and announced general availability of Prisma AIRS AI Gateway, built on Portkey, on July 16, 2026

What practitioners report, side by side

Each product's figures come from its own practitioners, for the group you pick.

LiteLLMBerriAI+8 MixedHow this figure is made
PortkeyPalo Alto Networks0 MixedHow this figure is made
Whose sources to count
Compare LiteLLM with
  • Portkey

Overall signal

All practitioners rate LiteLLM +10, 10 points above Portkey at 0. Most of the gap is in complaints, with 19 of Portkey's 50 sources negative against 28 of LiteLLM's 108.

The score counts the authors from all practitioners that take a side, one vote each with their latest view, and is how far positive votes lead negative ones, per 100 votes, so LiteLLM's +10 rests on votes split 35 positive, 42 mixed and 25 negative and Portkey's 0 on 18, 11 and 18.

A lead of a fifth of the votes reads positive and a lead of half strong positive, with the same lines below zero. The dots show each source, positive, mixed, negative. Run a pilot on one service's model traffic to measure added latency, failed fallbacks and how closely its spend records match each provider's bill.

Footprint on the AI Application Platform stack

They differ on one of 9 layers. On Tool use, LiteLLM supports it and Portkey touches it. Coverage is each product's placement on this stack, as its product page shows it. Core is a job the product owns; Supports and Touches are jobs it helps with. Coverage says nothing about how well a product does them.

Layers where LiteLLM and Portkey differ
LayerLiteLLMPortkey
Build
Tool useSupportsTouches
The 8 layers where they match
Layers where LiteLLM and Portkey match
LayerLiteLLMPortkey
Model
Model APIsTouchesTouches
Model gatewayCoreCore
Build
OrchestrationTouchesTouches
Data
RetrievalTouchesTouches
Evaluate
EvaluationTouchesTouches
Operate
ObservabilitySupportsSupports
Cloud deploymentTouchesTouches
GuardrailsSupportsSupports

What practitioners praise

Among all practitioners, LiteLLM alone has five praise themes that reach 5 sources from 3 authors. Virtual Keys, Budgets & Spend Tracking and Self-Hosted Control lead, at 19 of 24 and 12 of 12. One API with Fallbacks and Request Logs & Cost Data reach 5 sources from 3 authors only for Portkey, at 16 of 17 and 8 of 8. LiteLLM needs a pilot on the same provider traffic before you choose on either.

What practitioners praise, All practitioners
Praised forLiteLLMPortkey
Virtual Keys, Budgets & Spend Tracking19 of 24Not a theme in its sources
Self-Hosted Control12 of 12Not a theme in its sources
One API Across Providers12 of 24Not a theme in its sources
Routing, Fallbacks & Load Balancing8 of 10Not a theme in its sources
Provider & Model Coverage2 of 7Not a theme in its sources
One API with FallbacksNot a theme in its sources16 of 17
Request Logs & Cost DataNot a theme in its sources8 of 8

Each count is the sources that praise a theme, or raise it as a concern, out of those that discuss it. A row pairs the two products when both carry a theme under the same or an equivalent name.

A count ending in "so far" has under 5 sources from 3 authors among all practitioners. "Not a theme in its sources" means GILD found no theme of that name in that product's sources.

What practitioners raise as concerns

Among all practitioners, LiteLLM alone has five concern themes that reach 5 sources from 3 authors. Stability & Code Quality and Performance at Scale lead, at 29 of 29 and 14 of 16. Portkey alone has three concern themes that reach 5 sources from 3 authors. Provider Translation Bugs and Reliability & Streaming Bugs lead, at 14 of 15 and 8 of 9.

What practitioners raise as concerns, All practitioners
Raised as a concernLiteLLMPortkey
Stability & Code Quality29 of 29Not a theme in its sources
Performance at Scale14 of 16Not a theme in its sources
Security & Supply Chain10 of 14Not a theme in its sources
Operational Burden9 of 10Not a theme in its sources
Enterprise-Gated Features6 of 6Not a theme in its sources
Provider Translation BugsNot a theme in its sources14 of 15
Reliability & Streaming BugsNot a theme in its sources8 of 9
Open-Source MaintenanceNot a theme in its sources5 of 5
LiteLLM SignalsPortkey Signals

28 sources

  1. LiteLLM pricingOfficial documentationlitellm.ai
  2. LiteLLM docs: EnterpriseOfficial documentationdocs.litellm.ai
  3. LiteLLM docs: Budgets and rate limitsOfficial documentationdocs.litellm.ai
  4. LiteLLM docs: GuardrailsOfficial documentationdocs.litellm.ai
  5. LiteLLM docs: Logging callbacksOfficial documentationdocs.litellm.ai
  6. LiteLLM docs: SSO for the Admin UIOfficial documentationdocs.litellm.ai
  7. LiteLLM blog: Updated SOC 2 Type 2 report (Sep 8, 2026)Official documentationdocs.litellm.ai
  8. BerriAI/litellm LICENSEOfficial documentationgithub.com
  9. Portkey pricingOfficial documentationportkey.ai
  10. Portkey home page (Prisma AIRS AI Gateway notice)Official documentationportkey.ai
  11. Portkey docs: Enterprise offeringOfficial documentationportkey.ai
  12. Portkey docs: Enforce budget and rate limits for API keysOfficial documentationportkey.ai
  13. Portkey docs: Hybrid deployment architectureOfficial documentationportkey.ai
  14. Portkey-AI/gateway on GitHub (MIT license, last push May 25, 2026, last release v1.15.2)Official documentationgithub.com
  15. Palo Alto Networks: General availability of Prisma AIRS AI Gateway (Jul 16, 2026)Official documentationpaloaltonetworks.com
  16. Palo Alto Networks Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended Jul 31, 2026: Portkey acquisition completed May 29, 2026Public sourcesec.gov
  17. Portkey-AI/gateway issue #1718: SSRF allowlist bypass via the /v1/proxy/* route, gateway 1.15.2 and earlier (Jul 3, 2026)Public sourcegithub.com
  18. Show HN: Aqueduct AI Gateway, from a TU Vienna team (Jul 1, 2025)Public sourcenews.ycombinator.com
  19. Portkey-AI/gateway issue #1237: Platform outage from cache collisions on Portkey cloud (Jul 23, 2025)Public sourcegithub.com
  20. Portkey-AI/gateway issue #1363: connection errors in production (Sep 24, 2025)Public sourcegithub.com
  21. Portkey-AI/gateway issue #1739: Glama points users to Lightport, its maintained fork (Jul 18, 2026)Public sourcegithub.com
  22. Dennis Henry, Okta blog: How Okta deploys and secures AI for its employees (Feb 26, 2026)Public sourceokta.com
  23. Jack Wildman, FutureSearch blog: LiteLLM made us accidentally make our product free for a week (Jun 10, 2026)Public sourcefuturesearch.ai
  24. Bartosz Ocytko, Zalando Engineering Blog: Agentic engineering at Zalando, a snapshot (Aug 14, 2026)Public sourceengineering.zalando.com
  25. Reddit r/devops: running LiteLLM internally, per-team keys past a handful of teams (Jun 18, 2026)Public sourcereddit.com
  26. LiteLLM blog: How Pfizer improved LiteLLM gateway performance and resiliency (Sep 11, 2026)Official documentationdocs.litellm.ai
  27. LiteLLM docs: Production best practicesOfficial documentationdocs.litellm.ai
  28. Anthropic: Claude API pricing, Claude Sonnet 5.5 at US$2 and US$10 per million tokens (Oct 28, 2026)Public sourceplatform.claude.com
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