6 Portkey AI Gateway Alternatives – Based on Cost, Security Features & Model Routing (2026)

Quick Verdict

• nexos.ai – Best for Enterprise: its AI Gateway pairs smart LLM routing across 200+ models with SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001 and ISO 42001 certification and EU-hosted infrastructure.
• LiteLLM – Best for Open-Source Self-Hosting: LiteLLM removes the licence fee and gives full control, in exchange for running the infrastructure yourself.
• Kong AI Gateway – Best for Hybrid API Teams: Kong AI Gateway offers the most configurable load balancing and policy engine for organisations that already run Kong.
• Also worth a look: Cloudflare AI Gateway (Best for Edge Apps), Orq AI (Best for EU Sovereign Deployments) and OpenRouter (Best for Model Experimentation) complete the shortlist.
• Why now: Portkey became Prisma AIRS AI Gateway after Palo Alto Networks closed its acquisition on 29 May 2026, and standalone buyers may want to reassess.

The nexos.ai AI Gateway stands out as the strongest Portkey alternative for enterprise teams in 2026, with comparable smart LLM routing, EU-hosted infrastructure and ISO 42001 AI-management certification. Portkey built one of the most capable gateways on the market, and its move into Palo Alto Networks’ Prisma AIRS portfolio is the reason this comparison exists.

Gateways have become a frontline security control. IBM’s 2026 Cost of a Data Breach Report puts the global average breach at $4.99 million and finds that one in four malicious breaches were AI-enabled, costing about $6 million each.

UK figures point the same way. IBM’s 2025 UK findings show that only 31% of UK organisations have governance policies for AI use and shadow AI, so choosing a Portkey replacement is as much a security decision as a cost one.

We weighed each platform on the three criteria in this guide’s title: what you actually pay, which security controls ship by default, and how intelligently requests are routed.

No vendor paid for inclusion or reviewed these rankings, and this article contains no affiliate links or commissions.

Portkey Alternatives by Cost

Platform	Best For	Pricing Model	Free Option	Security Baseline
nexos.ai	Best for Enterprise	Custom enterprise offer	Demo on request	SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, ISO 42001, GDPR
LiteLLM	Best for Open-Source Self-Hosting	Free open source; Enterprise custom	Yes (self-hosted)	SOC 2 Type II (ISO 27001 recertifying)
Kong AI Gateway	Best for Hybrid API Teams	$105/mo per service, plus $34.25 per 1M requests	30-day trial	Enterprise compliance programme
Cloudflare AI Gateway	Best for Edge Apps	Core features free; 5% fee on Unified Billing credits	Yes	Cloudflare SOC 2 Type II
Orq AI	Best for EU Sovereign Deployments	4.5% on managed-key top-ups; BYOK free to 1M requests	50 requests/day limit until billing is added	SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, GDPR
OpenRouter	Best for Model Experimentation	5.5% Standard, 8% Business platform fee	50 requests/day on free models	SOC 2 Type II (trust centre)

What the Palo Alto Networks Deal Changes for Portkey Users

Palo Alto Networks completed its acquisition of Portkey on 29 May 2026, and the product now carries the Prisma AIRS AI Gateway name.

The gateway keeps its core feature set for existing customers. Retries, fallbacks, conditional rules, the semantic cache and the open-source core all remain, and the documented compliance set still spans SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA and GDPR.

Commercial terms remain the open question. Portkey’s log-based plans start at $49 per month for 100,000 logs and predate the acquisition. Public announcements haven’t yet addressed long-term pricing or packaging for standalone buyers outside the Palo Alto ecosystem. 

1. nexos.ai – Best for Enterprise

Former Portkey users looking for a vendor-neutral setup land closest to home with nexos.ai, an all-in-one AI platform for enterprises that serves developers through the AI Gateway and business teams through the AI Workspace.

Our team carried Portkey’s routing concepts over directly during setup. Fallbacks worked the way Portkey users would expect. When a provider lagged, requests moved to a backup model automatically. Model choice also happens per request. 

Smart LLM routing then decides, prompt by prompt, which of more than 200 models gives the best balance of price, ability and speed, drawing on providers such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Mistral and Kimi.  

Key Advantages

• Pricing follows a custom enterprise offer, not log tiers. Each organisation gets a tailored offer, and Enterprise contracts include single sign-on (SSO/SAML), role-based access, audit logging and service-level agreements. 
• AI-specific certification sits alongside the usual audits. SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001 and GDPR are joined by ISO 42001, the AI management standard, and the EU AI Act appears among the frameworks on its trust centre. 
• Spend controls reach the individual level. Spending ceilings can be set for a person or a team. LLM observability breaks cost down by model, project and request. Each service also gets its own key, which can be rotated or revoked. 
• Model training stays opt-in. Training on customer data needs explicit permission, and teams can switch on zero data retention where the model supports it. 
• Integrations cover developer and business tools. Developer integrations include the Vercel AI SDK, LangChain and the OpenAI Agents SDK, and AI Workspace connects to Slack, Gmail, Microsoft SharePoint and GitHub.

The company comes from the founders of Nord Security and Oxylabs. Tomas Okmanas, now its CEO, and Eimantas Sabaliauskas opened it in Vilnius toward the end of 2024, so security sat at the centre of the product from the first release. 

A Smart Router case study on the nexos.ai website reports a 71% reduction in Nord Security’s AI coding costs. A second Nord Security customer story covers a separate LLM caching result. In it, NordVPN’s CTO, Marijus Briedis, says:

“nexos.ai helped us reduce coding-agent LLM costs by 46% without changing our prompts, models, or developer workflows.”

Honours Worth Mentioning

nexos.ai was named Emerging Vilnius Ambassador 2026 and appears in the Euro Seed 50 list of Europe’s most promising seed-stage startups. 

Most Suitable For

Engineering leaders and procurement teams at enterprises in the UK and Europe who are reassessing Portkey before renewal and want vendor-neutral routing, EU hosting and ISO 42001-certified controls.

2. LiteLLM – Best for Open-Source Self-Hosting

LiteLLM is the usual starting point for Portkey users who want to keep the gateway in-house and drop subscription fees, and it is the open-source baseline every gateway gets compared to.

Its router reaches 140+ providers through one OpenAI-format API and supports latency-based, least-busy and lowest-cost routing. Teams install it with Docker, Helm or Terraform.

Key Advantages

• LiteLLM removes the licence fee. Its core carries an MIT licence, and the free tier covers spend caps per key or team, request and token rate limits, and third-party guardrail integrations.
• Spend tracking runs in detail. Costs roll up by key, team and tag, which helps with internal chargeback.
• Compliance evidence centres on SOC 2 Type II. A new report came out in September 2026, and LiteLLM is still working through ISO 27001 recertification. 
• Operations stay with your team. The database, cache and patch cycle are yours to run, and SSO, RBAC and audit logs require the custom-priced Enterprise plan.

LiteLLM began in San Francisco in 2023 under co-founders Krrish Dholakia and Ishaan Jaffer, who took it through Y Combinator’s W23 cohort. 

Ratings Worth Mentioning

Product Hunt 5.0/5 from 24 reviews.

Most Suitable For

Cost-conscious engineering teams with DevOps capacity who would rather run an open-source proxy than pay per stored log.

3. Kong AI Gateway – Best for Hybrid API Teams

Kong AI Gateway lets Portkey users whose APIs already run through Kong fold AI traffic into the same platform, extending Kong Gateway to model calls, MCP servers and agent-to-agent requests. 

Routing choice is Kong’s widest in this list. AI Proxy Advanced supports round-robin, consistent-hashing, lowest-latency, lowest-usage, priority and semantic load balancing.

Key Advantages

• The policy engine is the most granular here. AI Sanitizer, AI Semantic Prompt Guard and AI Rate Limiting Advanced cover PII, topic controls and cost-based limits.
• Deployment follows your infrastructure. Kong data planes can sit on-prem or in Kubernetes, or Kong can host them as Dedicated Cloud Gateways. 
• Pricing tracks services and requests. Each gateway service on Konnect Plus costs $105 a month, traffic adds $34.25 for every million requests, and advanced AI policies require Kong’s AI licence. 

Kong traces back to Mashape, which Augusto Marietti and Marco Palladino launched in Milan in 2009. Kong now counts United Airlines, HSBC, BMW and Nasdaq among its customers.

Ratings Worth Mentioning

Gartner Peer Insights 4.5/5 from 153 ratings (Kong Gateway) · G2 4.4/5 from 356 reviews (Kong Konnect).

Most Suitable For

API platform owners who already run Kong in production and want AI traffic governed by the same policy engine.

4. Cloudflare AI Gateway – Best for Edge Apps

Cloudflare AI Gateway gives Portkey users with apps on Cloudflare’s network the lowest-cost entry point in this list, with dashboard analytics, caching and rate limiting included free.

Routing goes beyond basic retries. Dynamic Routing splits traffic by user segment, request content or percentage through a visual flow builder, and Spend Limits set budgets per provider, model or custom metadata such as a user or team ID.

Key Advantages

• Getting started costs nothing. Core features are free, and Logpush export includes 10 million requests per month on Workers Paid.
• Sensitive data gets scanned. Guardrails and DLP scanning check prompts and responses for PII.
• Billing stays simple. Unified Billing passes provider prices through, with a 5% fee on purchased credits.
• Everything runs on Cloudflare’s network. Cache hits require exact prompt matches, and there is no self-hosted option.

Credentials Worth Mentioning

Cloudflare holds a SOC 2 Type II report for its platform, and AI Gateway is available on every Cloudflare plan.

Most Suitable For

Teams building on Cloudflare Workers and its edge network that want free analytics, caching and rate limiting.

5. Orq AI – Best for EU Sovereign Deployments

Orq AI offers the strongest data-sovereignty story for Portkey users with strict European residency needs, as an Amsterdam-based gateway and agent platform built and hosted in the EU.

The platform routes to 500+ models from 30+ providers with fallbacks, retries, caching, load balancing and an Auto Router.

Key Advantages

• Certification comes on every plan. SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 apply across plans, with a HIPAA BAA on Enterprise.
• Private deployment is available. Enterprise plans add VPC deployment through the AWS and Azure marketplaces and on-prem installs, including air-gapped.
• Sensitive data is guarded before it leaves. PII redaction and real-time guardrail policies apply before prompts reach a model.
• Billing runs in euros. SSO comes through a €300-per-month Teams add-on below Enterprise, and audit logs are Enterprise-only.

Anthony Diaz and Sohrab Hosseini founded Orq AI in 2022, and the company raised a €5 million seed round in December 2025.

Ratings Worth Mentioning

G2 4.5/5 from 1 review.

Most Suitable For

UK and EU organisations that need EU-hosted processing, VPC or on-prem deployment and euro-denominated billing.

6. OpenRouter – Best for Model Experimentation

OpenRouter gives Portkey users who mainly want broad model access the biggest catalogue here, aggregating more than 500 models from over 80 providers behind a single credit balance.

Its routing balances providers by price by default, prioritises providers without recent outages and supports sorting by price, throughput or latency.

Key Advantages

• The catalogue is the widest here. Free models are available for testing before committing spend.
• Privacy defaults lean conservative. Prompt logging is opt-in, and zero-data-retention routing is available.
• Enterprise contracts are an option. Enterprise adds SSO, SCIM and contractual SLAs.
• Fees scale as a percentage. Platform fees of 5.5% to 8% grow with spend, and it runs only as a hosted service.

CEO Alex Atallah leads the New York company, which launched in spring 2023 and closed a $113 million Series B, with CapitalG leading, in May 2026. In August 2026, Stripe agreed to acquire the company.

In a 1-star Trustpilot review from 26 September 2026, one user said tool calls kept failing even after switching models, and that those failed requests were billed anyway. 

Ratings Worth Mentioning

G2 4.6/5 from 25 reviews · Trustpilot 1.6/5 from 66 reviews.

Most Suitable For

Individual developers and early-stage teams that want to compare many models quickly without signing provider contracts.

Red Flags When Comparing AI Gateway Pricing

Headline prices rarely match the final invoice. Watch for these patterns before signing:

• Log-based tiers scale with traffic. Plans priced per stored log rise in step with traffic, even when model spend stays flat.
• Percentage fees apply to every dollar. A 5% to 8% platform fee is easy to absorb at $1,000 a month and harder to justify at $100,000.
• Check which tier includes identity controls. Confirm whether SSO, RBAC and audit logs come with the plan you’re pricing.
• Control mapping speeds up audits. A gateway should make it easy to show alignment with the EU AI Act, which has applied in most respects since 2 August 2026, and with the NCSC’s secure AI development guidelines.

The Bottom Line

nexos.ai stands out as our first choice for teams leaving Portkey, combining smart LLM routing, ISO 42001-certified controls and EU-hosted infrastructure in its AI Gateway.

LiteLLM offers the strongest zero-licence-cost path, and Kong AI Gateway serves organisations standardised on Kong’s API platform. Portkey itself remains a strong fit for teams invested in Palo Alto Networks’ security stack.

Cloudflare AI Gateway gives edge apps free core features, Orq AI covers EU-sovereign deployments, and OpenRouter provides the widest catalogue for model experimentation.

Your projected traffic should drive the pricing comparison, and that comparison should be finished before your Portkey renewal date.

FAQs

Is Portkey still available as a standalone product?

Portkey now operates as Prisma AIRS AI Gateway under Palo Alto Networks, and its open-source gateway remains available under the MIT licence. Buyers should confirm long-term pricing and packaging directly with Palo Alto Networks.

Which alternative is closest to Portkey on routing features?

The nexos.ai AI Gateway is the closest managed option. It pairs automatic fallbacks with per-request model selection that balances spend, quality and latency, and there is no gateway to host. Kong AI Gateway offers the widest choice of routing algorithms. 

How does nexos.ai pricing compare with Portkey’s log-based plans?

Portkey prices by stored logs, starting at $49 a month for 100,000. nexos.ai works on custom enterprise offers instead, so teams book a demo or talk to sales to get pricing matched to their usage.

Which compliance frameworks does nexos.ai cover?

nexos.ai addresses AI-specific governance through ISO 42001 and lists the EU AI Act on its trust centre, next to SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001 and GDPR.