Not Diamond vs Portkey
Both are llm gateways tools. Here is how they actually differ on price, billing model and deployment.
Not Diamond
A model router that recommends rather than proxies - it tells your gateway which model to call and gets out of the way. That architecture means no request-path dependency, which nothing else in this category offers.
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.
| Not Diamond | Portkey | |
|---|---|---|
| Category | LLM Gateways | LLM Gateways |
| Our rating | 4/5 | 4/5 |
| Starting price | Conflicting reports | $49/mo |
| Billing meter | No usage metering | No usage metering |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free self-hosting | No or paid tier only | Yes, free |
| Best for | Teams already running a gateway who want smarter per-request model selection without putting another vendor in the request path, particularly for coding agents where model spend is high and uncontrolled. | 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 Not Diamond
Not Diamond is architecturally the most interesting thing in this category because it declines to be a gateway. Integrations are stack-agnostic through its API, and recommendations are executed in your own model gateway and harness - so it tells you which model to call and gets out of the way. Every other router in this category is a proxy, which means adopting it creates a request-path dependency and a new availability risk. Not Diamond has neither. It composes with LiteLLM, Vercel, Cloudflare or your own proxy rather than replacing any of them, which makes it unusually low-commitment to try. The product is a pre-trained Chat router, a Code router aimed at coding-agent cost currently in early access, and custom routers trained on your own data. That last one matters most, because the weakness of generic routing is that your workload is not the benchmark it was tuned on. The unsatisfying part is pricing, where sources directly contradict each other, and the fact that the most differentiated capability is still early access.
Full Not Diamond 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 Not Diamond and Portkey?
Not Diamond: Teams already running a gateway who want smarter per-request model selection without putting another vendor in the request path, particularly for coding agents where model spend is high and uncontrolled. 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, Not Diamond or Portkey?
It depends entirely on your workload shape, because they meter differently - Not Diamond bills on no usage metering and Portkey bills on no usage metering. Published starting prices are Conflicting reports 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 Not Diamond or Portkey?
Not Diamond: No or paid tier only. Portkey: Yes, free. Free self-hosting means no licence fee, not no cost - you still own the infrastructure, upgrades and on-call.