Stay if you're standardizing on Palo Alto for AI security. Look around if you need any of these: - A gateway whose only business is the gateway. - Budgets and SSO without an enterprise contract. - Usage-based pricing with no log metering. - Inference included, so you can drop separate provider contracts.

Portkey Alternatives After the Palo Alto Acquisition: 7 AI Gateways Compared (2026)

Updated October 2026.

Palo Alto Networks closed its acquisition of Portkey on May 29, 2026, and is making Portkey the core AI gateway inside its Prisma AIRS security platform. For enterprises that already buy Prisma, that's convenient. For startups and mid-size teams that picked Portkey as a developer tool, it's a reason to check whether the roadmap still fits.

Portkey isn't the only change. Mintlify acquired Helicone in March 2026 and put it in maintenance mode, and Stripe agreed to acquire OpenRouter in August. If you're leaving Portkey because of an acquisition, check that your next gateway hasn't just changed hands too.

What Portkey costs today

Developer: free, 10K logs a month, 3-day log retention.
Production: $49/month for 100K logs, then $9 per extra 100K, with 30-day log retention.
Enterprise: custom. SSO, granular budgets and rate limits, VPC hosting, BAAs and custom retention are listed only here.

If you need SSO or per-team budgets, you're already on an enterprise contract with a security vendor.

Should you move?

Stay if you're standardizing on Palo Alto for AI security. Look around if you need any of these:

A gateway whose only business is the gateway.
Budgets and SSO without an enterprise contract.
Usage-based pricing with no log metering.
Inference included, so you can drop separate provider contracts.

The 7 best Portkey alternatives

Alternative	Best for	Pricing	SSO / team budgets
Concentrate AI	Managed gateway + inference, compliance included	Tokens only, $0 fees	SSO included free; budgets count BYOK
Vercel AI Gateway	Vercel-hosted apps	List price + metered add-ons	Budgets at 4 scopes; BYOK excluded
TrueFoundry	Pooled team budgets	$25/user/mo Pro

1. Concentrate AI

Concentrate does the routing, fallbacks and guardrails that most teams used Portkey for. It also sells the inference, so one API key replaces a contract with each provider. It charges no platform fee, card fee or BYOK fee, and there's no log-volume metering.

Same-model failover across Anthropic, Bedrock, Azure and Vertex.
ZDR that fails closed (104 models) and PII redaction before prompts leave.
Spend by team, project and key, with budgets and anomaly alerts. Budgets count BYOK spend by default.
SSO included free, plus SOC 2 Type II and SOC 3 at trust.concentrate.ai, and a BAA on the paid plan for teams handling PHI.
A Portkey migration guide in the docs. Most moves are a base-URL and key swap.

Gaps vs. Portkey: no prompt-management UI and no OpenTelemetry export yet.

2. Vercel AI Gateway

Zero markup and BYOK fee, budgets at team, project, key and user scope, and trace drains. BYOK spend doesn't count toward budgets, and team-wide ZDR is $0.10 per 1,000 requests.

3. TrueFoundry

The closest match for Portkey's enterprise governance. Pro is $25 per user per month and includes SSO and up to 10 budget rules.

4. LiteLLM

If you liked Portkey's open-source gateway, LiteLLM is the most common self-hosted replacement. SSO and audit logs are in Enterprise.

5. Cloudflare AI Gateway

Caching, analytics and rate limiting are free, with spend limits keyed on metadata. Unified Billing adds 5%.

6. OpenRouter

The biggest model catalog, but 5.5% on credit purchases and fewer governance controls than Portkey. Stripe agreed to acquire it in August 2026, so it's another platform changing hands.

7. Bifrost

A fast, Apache 2.0 Go gateway for teams that want to self-host.

Migrating off Portkey in an afternoon

List every service that calls the Portkey endpoint, and note which features it uses (configs, guardrails, prompts).
Point one non-critical service at the new base URL with a new key. Check outputs and latency.
Recreate fallbacks and budgets in the new gateway. On Concentrate, you pick a model and your policies, and fallbacks are built in.
Move the remaining services one at a time. Keep Portkey running until the logs show zero traffic.

FAQ

Is Portkey still available?

Yes. Palo Alto Networks says Portkey becomes the core AI gateway in Prisma AIRS. The Developer and Production plans are still listed.

What's the cheapest Portkey alternative?

For managed options, Concentrate charges no fees above tokens and doesn't meter logs. Self-hosted LiteLLM and Bifrost are free to run.

What about Helicone?

Mintlify acquired Helicone in March 2026, and it's in maintenance mode: security fixes and new models, no new features. It's not a good destination for a migration.

Which alternative has the best compliance story?

Look for SOC 2 Type II, ZDR enforcement and PII redaction outside an enterprise contract. Concentrate includes all three, plus free SSO. Teams handling PHI can get a BAA on Concentrate's paid plan; Portkey lists BAAs only on Enterprise.

Does any alternative replace Portkey's prompt management?

Not one-for-one. Concentrate focuses on routing, spend and data controls. If you rely on prompt management, keep a dedicated tool for it next to your gateway.