LiteLLM vs Portkey
The question that decides it: Do you want to build and run the governance layer yourself, or pay for one that already exists?
Our verdict
Want maximum provider breadth for free and have platform engineers to run it: LiteLLM. Want RBAC, SSO, audit logs, guardrails and prompt management working this week without building them: Portkey, at $49/month for the Production tier.
Why
Both have an open-source core and both can be self-hosted, so the licence is not the dividing line people expect. LiteLLM is MIT with the whole proxy free forever, including virtual keys, team budgets, RPM/TPM limits and guardrails. Portkey is open core: an MIT-licensed gateway covering routing, fallbacks, conditional routing, semantic cache, budgets and guardrails, with a hosted control plane on top.
Coverage favours LiteLLM decisively. 140+ providers against Portkey's 40 to 48. Neither publishes a model total worth quoting - LiteLLM states none at all, and Portkey's own pages range from 250 to 2,300 - so providers are the honest measure, and on that measure nothing else in this catalog is close to LiteLLM. It also has by far the largest community here at 57,500 GitHub stars, which matters when you are debugging a proxy at 2am and need someone to have hit your problem first.
The counterweight is scale. Third-party operators report the Python proxy hitting a GIL bottleneck past roughly 300 requests per second per instance, with P99 latency blowing out to seconds and memory growth ending in OOM. An independent 2026 comparison recommends staying under 250-300 RPS per instance. That is not fatal — you shard instances — but it is real operational work, and it means LiteLLM's free licence is not the same as a free deployment.
Portkey's pitch is that the governance layer is already built. RBAC, SSO/SCIM, audit logs, budget and rate limits, PII-redaction guardrails, plus a compliance posture spanning SOC 2, HIPAA, GDPR and ISO 27001 with custom BAAs available. For LiteLLM, SSO, RBAC, audit logs and SCIM all sit behind a commercial licence whose price is not published. If you need those controls, the honest comparison is not "free versus $49" — it is "$49 versus a quote".
The catch on Portkey is its meter. Pricing is on recorded logs rather than tokens, at $9 per additional 100,000 requests past the plan allowance. High-request, small-payload workloads — agent loops especially — inflate that number fast, and it is exactly the shape of traffic that has been growing. Model it against your actual request count, not your token count.
Which one, concretely
Choose LiteLLM if
- You need the widest provider coverage available — 140+ providers, more than anything else here
- You want a genuinely free, MIT-licensed proxy with no usage fee
- You have platform engineers who can shard and operate it
- You want batch API support, which Portkey does not list
Choose Portkey if
- You need RBAC, SSO, audit logs and guardrails without building or negotiating for them
- You want a documented SOC 2, HIPAA, GDPR and ISO 27001 posture from the vendor
- Your request volume would push LiteLLM past its reported per-instance ceiling
- You want prompt management and a semantic cache in the same control plane
What catches people out
- LiteLLM's reported ~300 RPS per-instance ceiling means your capacity plan needs multiple instances and a load balancer in front. Budget the ops time.
- LiteLLM's SSO, RBAC, audit logs and SCIM require a commercial licence at an unpublished price, so the free tier is not the enterprise tier.
- Portkey meters recorded logs, not tokens: $9 per extra 100k requests. Agent workloads with many small calls are the worst case for this meter.
- Self-hosting Portkey loses the hosted dashboards, prompt management and guardrails UI — the parts you were paying for.
- Vendor benchmark numbers on both sides are self-run and conflict sharply. Kong measured LiteLLM 859% slower than Kong; treat all such figures as marketing until independently reproduced.
Side by side
4 of 20 fields differ, marked with a dot. Every figure links to the vendor page it came from. Blank values read Not published rather than No — silence from a vendor is not a negative answer.
| Field | LiteLLM | Portkey |
|---|---|---|
| Ease of leaving Derived score, higher is easier | 100/100 Easy to leave | 100/100 Easy to leave |
| What kind of product Category | Open source | Managed gateway |
| Who runs it Deployment model | Self-host only | Managed or self-host |
| Licence Licence | MIT | Open core |
| Models available Models available | Not published | 250–2,300 |
| Model providers reachable Upstream providers | Not published | 40–48 |
| Markup on model prices Token markup | None | Not published |
| Fee to add funds Credit purchase fee | None | Not published |
| Monthly cost per person Seat fee | None | Not published |
| GitHub stars GitHub stars | 57,500 | 12,848 |
| Delay it adds Proxy overhead | 0.66 ms | Not published |
| Requests per second ceiling Throughput | 2,800 rps | Not published |
| Similar-question caching Semantic cache | Yes | Yes |
| Content guardrails Content guardrails | Yes | Yes |
| Prompt versioning Prompt management | Not published | Yes |
| Separate keys per team or app Virtual keys | Yes | Not published |
| Spending limits Budget controls | Yes | Yes |
| MCP support MCP support | Yes | Yes |
| SOC 2 audited SOC 2 audited | Not published | Yes |
| Will sign a HIPAA agreement HIPAA BAA | Not published | Yes |
| Runs fully disconnected Air-gapped deployment | Yes | Not published |
Verified 3 days ago for LiteLLM and Verified 3 days ago for Portkey. Want more fields, or a third option in the mix? Open these two in the full comparison tool.
Common questions
Is LiteLLM really free?
The proxy is MIT-licensed and free forever, including virtual keys, budgets, rate limits and guardrails. But SSO, RBAC, audit logs and SCIM require a commercial licence whose price is not published, and you carry the infrastructure and operational cost of running it yourself.
How much traffic can LiteLLM handle?
Third-party operators report the Python proxy hitting a GIL bottleneck past roughly 300 requests per second per instance, with P99 latency degrading to seconds. An independent 2026 comparison recommends staying under 250-300 RPS per instance and scaling horizontally beyond that.
What does Portkey actually cost?
There is a free Developer tier with 10,000 recorded logs per month, and a Production tier at $49/month. Pricing meters recorded logs rather than tokens, with $9 per additional 100,000 requests, so high-request workloads cost more than the headline suggests.