Keywords AI

Helicone vs Portkey

Compare Helicone and Portkey side by side. Both are tools in the LLM Gateways category.

Quick Comparison

Helicone
Helicone
Portkey
Portkey
CategoryLLM GatewaysLLM Gateways
PricingFreemiumFreemium
Best ForDeveloper teams who need visibility into their LLM usage, costs, and performanceEngineering teams who need a reliable, observable gateway for production LLM applications
Websitehelicone.aiportkey.ai
Key Features
  • LLM observability and monitoring
  • Cost tracking and analytics
  • Request caching
  • Rate limiting and user management
  • Open-source with managed option
  • AI gateway with 200+ models
  • Automatic retries and fallbacks
  • Semantic caching
  • Guardrails and content filtering
  • Detailed cost and latency analytics
Use Cases
  • LLM cost monitoring and optimization
  • Production request debugging
  • User-level usage tracking and rate limiting
  • Caching to reduce latency and cost
  • Team-wide LLM spend management
  • 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

When to Choose Helicone vs Portkey

Helicone
Choose Helicone if you need
  • LLM cost monitoring and optimization
  • Production request debugging
  • User-level usage tracking and rate limiting
Pricing: Freemium
Portkey
Choose Portkey if you need
  • Enterprise LLM deployment with reliability
  • Multi-provider failover and load balancing
  • Cost reduction through semantic caching
Pricing: Freemium

About Helicone

Helicone is an open-source LLM observability and proxy platform. By adding a single line of code, developers get request logging, cost tracking, caching, rate limiting, and analytics for their LLM applications. Helicone supports all major LLM providers and can function as both a gateway proxy and a logging-only integration.

About Portkey

Portkey is an AI gateway that provides a unified API for 200+ LLMs with built-in reliability features including automatic retries, fallbacks, load balancing, and caching. The platform includes observability with detailed request logs, cost tracking, and performance analytics. Portkey also offers guardrails, access controls, and virtual keys for managing LLM usage across teams.

What is LLM Gateways?

Unified API platforms and proxies that aggregate multiple LLM providers behind a single endpoint, providing model routing, fallback, caching, rate limiting, cost optimization, and access control.

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