Question 1

Is Portkey better than vLLM?

Accepted Answer

It depends on your use case. Portkey is known for AI gateway for reliable and fast LLM applications, while vLLM High-throughput LLM serving engine. See our full comparison above for a detailed breakdown.

Question 2

Is Portkey free?

Accepted Answer

Portkey pricing: Free + Pro plans.

Question 3

Is vLLM free?

Accepted Answer

vLLM pricing: Free (open-source).

Question 4

What are the main differences between Portkey and vLLM?

Accepted Answer

Portkey and vLLM differ in features, pricing, and platform support. Portkey: AI gateway for reliable and fast LLM applications. vLLM: High-throughput LLM serving engine. See the full side-by-side comparison above for details.

Feature	Portkey	vLLM
Category	LLM APIs & Inference	Local AI Infrastructure
Pricing	Free + Pro plans	Free (open-source)
GitHub Stars	6k	✓ More stars 45k
Platforms	Web, Docker	Linux
Key Features	✓ AI gateway ✓ Fallbacks ✓ Load balancing ✓ Caching ✓ Observability	✓ PagedAttention ✓ Continuous batching ✓ Tensor parallelism ✓ OpenAI-compatible API ✓ Multi-GPU ✓ Quantization
Pros	+ Automatic fallbacks + Load balancing + Request caching + Observability built-in + Open-source gateway	+ Extremely fast inference + Efficient GPU memory usage + OpenAI-compatible API + Continuous batching + Production-ready
Cons	− Added infrastructure layer − Learning curve − Some features need Pro − Latency overhead	− Requires NVIDIA GPU − Complex setup for beginners − Limited model format support − Heavy resource requirements
Tags	gatewayreliabilityobservabilityapi	open-sourceinferenceservinggpuhigh-throughput

PortkeyvsvLLM

Portkey

vLLM

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