LiteLLM vs Portkey
Both are llm gateways tools. Here is how they actually differ on price, billing model and deployment.
LiteLLM
The most widely adopted open-source LLM gateway, MIT licensed with 100+ provider integrations and zero markup on your tokens. The catch is that you operate it, and published enterprise pricing is wildly inconsistent.
Portkey
An open-source LLM gateway that routes to 1,600+ models with fallbacks, caching, budgets and guardrails. The gateway self-hosts free under Apache 2.0 - but real logging, traces and analytics require the managed paid tier.
| LiteLLM | Portkey | |
|---|---|---|
| Category | LLM Gateways | LLM Gateways |
| Our rating | 5/5 | 4/5 |
| Starting price | $0 self-hosted | $49/mo |
| Billing meter | No usage metering | No usage metering |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free self-hosting | Yes, free | Yes, free |
| Best for | Teams with engineering capacity that want provider-agnostic routing with no per-token markup, particularly at volumes where a percentage fee on a managed gateway becomes significant. | Teams that want one gateway to route, cache, budget and guardrail across many LLM providers, and are fine paying for the managed tier once they need real observability |
Our verdict on LiteLLM
LiteLLM is the default open-source LLM gateway and deserves to be. It is MIT licensed, fronts 100+ providers behind an OpenAI-compatible endpoint, and takes no markup on your tokens - which is the decisive difference at any real volume, because managed alternatives charge a percentage of everything you spend forever. Adopting it is largely a base URL change, and so is leaving, which is an unusually honest position for infrastructure to be in. The cost is operational rather than financial. You run the proxy, the database, the monitoring and the upgrades, which realistically means a few hundred dollars a month of infrastructure and a person who owns it. Releases are frequent enough that pinning to stable versions is advisable. The one genuinely unsatisfying part is enterprise pricing, where third-party sources disagree so wildly - from $250 a month to around $30,000 a year - that none of them can be trusted, and enterprise SSO being free only up to five users means identity management turns into a commercial conversation sooner than you might expect.
Full LiteLLM review →Our verdict on Portkey
Portkey is the strongest LLM gateway in this set, and the open-source core is a genuinely good, free, self-hostable proxy for routing, fallbacks and guardrails. The catch is where the value migrates. Self-host gives you routing for free, but the logs, traces and analytics that most teams actually adopt an observability tool for live on the managed tier. Know that split before you plan a self-hosted deployment, or you'll stand up the gateway and then discover the dashboard you wanted is a paid feature.
Full Portkey review →Frequently Asked Questions
What is the main difference between LiteLLM and Portkey?
LiteLLM: Teams with engineering capacity that want provider-agnostic routing with no per-token markup, particularly at volumes where a percentage fee on a managed gateway becomes significant. Portkey: Teams that want one gateway to route, cache, budget and guardrail across many LLM providers, and are fine paying for the managed tier once they need real observability Both sit in LLM Gateways, so the decision usually comes down to billing model and deployment rather than raw capability.
Which is cheaper, LiteLLM or Portkey?
It depends entirely on your workload shape, because they meter differently - LiteLLM bills on no usage metering and Portkey bills on no usage metering. Published starting prices are $0 self-hosted and $49/mo respectively, but those numbers are not comparable until you apply them to the same traffic. Use our cost calculator to model both against your own request volume and span count.
Can I self-host LiteLLM or Portkey?
LiteLLM: Yes, free. Portkey: Yes, free. Free self-hosting means no licence fee, not no cost - you still own the infrastructure, upgrades and on-call.