Vercel AI GatewayvsPortkey

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

Vercel AI Gateway

LLM APIs & Inference

Unified API gateway for routing app calls across hundreds of AI models

Full review →Website ↗

Portkey

LLM APIs & Inference

AI gateway for reliable and fast LLM applications

Full review →Website ↗
FeatureVercel AI GatewayPortkey
CategoryLLM APIs & InferenceLLM APIs & Inference
PricingFree monthly credits; pay-as-you-go at provider list price with no markupFree + Pro plans
GitHub Stars—
✓ More stars
6k
PlatformsWeb, APIWeb, Docker
Key Features
  • ✓ Single API key
  • ✓ Hundreds of models
  • ✓ Unified model API
  • ✓ Provider routing and fallbacks
  • ✓ Automatic retries
  • ✓ Usage and spend monitoring
  • ✓ Bring Your Own Key
  • ✓ AI SDK and OpenAI-compatible APIs
  • ✓ AI gateway
  • ✓ Fallbacks
  • ✓ Load balancing
  • ✓ Caching
  • ✓ Observability
Pros
  • + One endpoint for many model providers
  • + Centralized usage, spend, and observability
  • + Automatic retries and fallbacks improve production resilience
  • + No token markup according to Vercel docs
  • + Works with AI SDK and OpenAI-compatible API clients
  • + Automatic fallbacks
  • + Load balancing
  • + Request caching
  • + Observability built-in
  • + Open-source gateway
Cons
  • − Best fit for teams already building web apps or using Vercel/AI SDK
  • − Underlying provider terms and model limits still apply
  • − BYOK fallback can still consume AI Gateway credits
  • − Exact model pricing should be checked in the current Gateway model list
  • − Added infrastructure layer
  • − Learning curve
  • − Some features need Pro
  • − Latency overhead
Tags
ai-gatewaymodel-routingvercelai-sdkllm-apibyokobservability
gatewayreliabilityobservabilityapi

Want to compare different tools?

← Back to compare picker

Related Comparisons

Vercel AI Gateway vs Hugging Face →Portkey vs Hugging Face →Vercel AI Gateway vs LiteLLM →Portkey vs LiteLLM →Vercel AI Gateway vs Fireworks AI →Portkey vs Fireworks AI →Vercel AI Gateway vs Groq →Portkey vs Groq →Vercel AI Gateway vs Modal →Portkey vs Modal →Vercel AI Gateway vs OpenRouter →Portkey vs OpenRouter →