PortkeyvsHelicone

Full side-by-side comparison — features, pricing, platforms, and which one wins in 2026.

Portkey

LLM APIs & Inference

AI gateway for reliable and fast LLM applications

Full review →Website ↗

Helicone

MLOps & Monitoring

Open-source LLM observability platform

Full review →Website ↗
FeaturePortkeyHelicone
CategoryLLM APIs & InferenceMLOps & Monitoring
PricingFree + Pro plansFree + Pro plans
GitHub Stars
✓ More stars
6k
3k
PlatformsWeb, DockerWeb
Key Features
  • ✓ AI gateway
  • ✓ Fallbacks
  • ✓ Load balancing
  • ✓ Caching
  • ✓ Observability
  • ✓ Request logging
  • ✓ Cost tracking
  • ✓ Latency monitoring
  • ✓ Prompt management
  • ✓ User tracking
Pros
  • + Automatic fallbacks
  • + Load balancing
  • + Request caching
  • + Observability built-in
  • + Open-source gateway
  • + One-line integration
  • + Cost tracking
  • + Latency monitoring
  • + Prompt management
  • + Open-source
Cons
  • − Added infrastructure layer
  • − Learning curve
  • − Some features need Pro
  • − Latency overhead
  • − Limited free tier
  • − Cloud-focused
  • − Smaller feature set vs W&B
  • − Less mature
Tags
gatewayreliabilityobservabilityapi
observabilitymonitoringcostsopen-source

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