Portkey vs Helicone
The question that decides it: Are you starting something new, or do you already run Helicone and are deciding whether to stay?
Our verdict
For a new build, Portkey. Helicone was acquired by Mintlify in March 2026 and is reported to be in maintenance mode with no new features planned, which is disqualifying for a component on your critical request path.
Why
On paper these overlap heavily: both are open-core-ish gateways with observability, both self-hostable, both claiming SOC 2 and HIPAA, both with zero token markup. Helicone is Apache-2.0 with 6,109 GitHub stars and genuinely strong request analytics — sessions, per-user breakdowns, custom properties, an HQL query language and alerting. If the question were purely "which has better observability", Helicone would have a real case.
But the question is not that. Helicone was acquired by Mintlify on 3 March 2026, and is reported to be in maintenance mode with no new features planned. Its standalone Rust gateway repository has not had a functional commit since July 2025. Putting a component that is not being developed on the path every model request takes is a risk that no feature advantage offsets — when a provider changes an API, a maintenance-mode proxy is the thing that does not get updated.
Portkey is the opposite posture: an MIT-licensed gateway core with a full governance stack on top — RBAC, SSO/SCIM, audit logs, budget and rate limits, PII-redaction guardrails — plus an MCP registry with OAuth 2.1. It has 12,848 stars, roughly double Helicone's, and is actively developed. Its compliance claims cover SOC 2, HIPAA, GDPR and ISO 27001 with custom BAAs.
There is one honest caveat in Portkey's favour that is not really about Helicone: third-party reviews note Portkey has a slower development cadence and a smaller self-hosting community than LiteLLM. If active development is your deciding criterion, LiteLLM is the more active project than either. But between these two specifically, Portkey is being built and Helicone is not.
If you already run Helicone and it works, there is no emergency. Apache-2.0 means you can self-host it indefinitely and nobody can take it away. The advice is to stop building new dependencies on it and to have a migration target picked before you need one.
Which one, concretely
Choose Portkey if
- You are starting a new build and need something under active development
- You need governance — RBAC, SSO/SCIM, audit logs, guardrails — rather than analytics
- You want conditional routing and a semantic cache
- You want an MCP registry with OAuth 2.1 in the open-source gateway
Choose Helicone if
- You specifically need deep per-request, per-user analytics with a query language
- You already run it successfully and self-host under Apache-2.0
- Your main requirement is observability and you will route traffic elsewhere
- You want config-as-code, which Helicone supports and is worth keeping
What catches people out
- Helicone's acquisition by Mintlify (3 March 2026) and reported maintenance mode is the single most important fact about it. Verify current development status before choosing it for anything new.
- Helicone's Hobby plan drops logs above 10 per minute, which can silently truncate agent traces — you lose data without an error.
- Helicone's log- and storage-based pricing gets expensive at very high request counts.
- Portkey meters recorded logs at $9 per extra 100k requests, so high-request workloads cost more than the $49/month headline.
- Third-party reviews note Portkey has a slower cadence and smaller self-hosting community than LiteLLM.
Side by side
4 of 19 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 | Portkey | Helicone |
|---|---|---|
| Ease of leaving Derived score, higher is easier | 100/100 Easy to leave | 100/100 Easy to leave |
| What kind of product Category | Managed gateway | Managed gateway |
| Who runs it Deployment model | Managed or self-host | Managed or self-host |
| Licence Licence | Open core | Apache-2.0 |
| Models available Models available | 250–2,300 | ~100 |
| Model providers reachable Upstream providers | 40–48 | 20–100 |
| Markup on model prices Token markup | Not published | None |
| Monthly cost per person Seat fee | Not published | None |
| GitHub stars GitHub stars | 12,848 | 6,109 |
| Usage dashboards and logs Observability | Yes | Yes |
| Quality testing Evals | Yes | Yes |
| Content guardrails Content guardrails | Yes | No |
| Similar-question caching Semantic cache | Yes | Not published |
| Prompt versioning Prompt management | Yes | Yes |
| Rule-based routing Conditional routing | Yes | Not published |
| MCP support MCP support | Yes | Not published |
| SOC 2 audited SOC 2 audited | Yes | Yes |
| Will sign a HIPAA agreement HIPAA BAA | Yes | Yes |
| Does not retain your data Zero data retention | Yes | Yes |
| Settings can live in version control Declarative config-as-code | Yes | Yes |
Verified 3 days ago for Portkey and Verified 3 days ago for Helicone. Want more fields, or a third option in the mix? Open these two in the full comparison tool.
Common questions
Is Helicone still maintained?
Helicone was acquired by Mintlify on 3 March 2026 and is reported to be in maintenance mode with no new features planned. Its standalone Rust gateway repository has had no functional commit since July 2025. It is Apache-2.0, so existing self-hosted deployments remain usable, but you should not build new dependencies on it without verifying current status.
Which has better observability?
Helicone, on features: sessions, per-user analytics, custom properties, an HQL query language and alerting are stronger than Portkey's. The problem is that Helicone is reported to be in maintenance mode, so that advantage is unlikely to grow.
Can I keep using Helicone if it is unmaintained?
Yes. It is Apache-2.0, so you can self-host it indefinitely regardless of the vendor's plans. The practical advice is to stop adding new dependencies on it and to choose a migration target before you are forced to.