Question 1

Is Portkey better than OpenRouter?

Accepted Answer

It depends on your use case. Portkey is known for AI gateway for reliable and fast LLM applications, while OpenRouter Unified API for 200+ AI models from all providers. See our full comparison above for a detailed breakdown.

Question 2

Is Portkey free?

Accepted Answer

Portkey pricing: Free + Pro plans.

Question 3

Is OpenRouter free?

Accepted Answer

OpenRouter pricing: Pay-per-use (varies by model).

Question 4

What are the main differences between Portkey and OpenRouter?

Accepted Answer

Portkey and OpenRouter differ in features, pricing, and platform support. Portkey: AI gateway for reliable and fast LLM applications. OpenRouter: Unified API for 200+ AI models from all providers. See the full side-by-side comparison above for details.

Feature	Portkey	OpenRouter
Category	LLM APIs & Inference	LLM APIs & Inference
Pricing	Free + Pro plans	Pay-per-use (varies by model)
GitHub Stars	✓ More stars 6k	—
Platforms	Web, Docker	Web
Key Features	✓ AI gateway ✓ Fallbacks ✓ Load balancing ✓ Caching ✓ Observability	✓ 200+ models ✓ Unified API ✓ Auto-fallback ✓ Rate limiting ✓ Usage tracking ✓ OpenAI-compatible
Pros	+ Automatic fallbacks + Load balancing + Request caching + Observability built-in + Open-source gateway	+ Access to 100+ models via one API + Automatic fallbacks + Pay-per-use pricing + Model comparison features + Free models available
Cons	− Added infrastructure layer − Learning curve − Some features need Pro − Latency overhead	− Added latency from proxy layer − Markup on some model prices − Depends on upstream availability − Limited advanced features
Tags	gatewayreliabilityobservabilityapi	apimulti-modelgatewayroutingpay-per-use

PortkeyvsOpenRouter

Portkey

OpenRouter

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