Portkey vs Cloudflare AI Gateway

Detailed side-by-side comparison to help you choose the right tool

Portkey

🔴Developer

LLM Gateways & Infrastructure

AI gateway and control plane for production GenAI: routes calls across 250+ LLMs with one unified API, plus guardrails, prompt management, observability, budgets, and an MCP-aware agent runtime.

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Starting Price

Custom
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Cloudflare AI Gateway

App Deployment

Cloudflare AI Gateway is a free AI observability and control layer that proxies requests to OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and 25+ providers with caching, rate limiting, logging, DLP, and Guardrails.

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Starting Price

Free
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Feature Comparison

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FeaturePortkeyCloudflare AI Gateway
CategoryLLM Gateways & InfrastructureApp Deployment
Pricing Plans97 tiers6 tiers
Starting PriceFree
Key Features
    • • LLM Request Routing
    • • Response Caching
    • • Rate Limiting

    Portkey - Pros & Cons

    Pros

    • ✓Provider-agnostic routing with declarative configs that an SRE can change without app deploys
    • ✓Strong governance primitives (virtual keys, budgets, RBAC) that internal gateways usually skip
    • ✓Built-in guardrails and observability remove the need for a separate vendor for each
    • ✓Self-hosted and BYOC options make it viable for regulated and air-gapped deployments

    Cons

    • ✗Pricing page is JS-rendered and dollar amounts must be confirmed manually on site
    • ✗Adds a network hop and latency overhead — small but non-zero next to direct provider calls
    • ✗Overkill for single-provider single-app teams who do not need governance
    • ✗Some advanced features (Agents, BYOC) require Enterprise contracts

    Cloudflare AI Gateway - Pros & Cons

    Pros

    • ✓Core features are genuinely free on every Cloudflare account — analytics, caching, rate limiting, DLP, persistent logs
    • ✓One line of code change works with existing OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google SDKs across 25+ providers
    • ✓Runs on Cloudflare's edge so proxy latency overhead is single-digit milliseconds globally

    Cons

    • ✗Log retention is capped per plan (100k Free / 10M per gateway Paid) — not unlimited
    • ✗Span-level observability and evals are thinner than Langfuse or Helicone
    • ✗Dynamic Routing, Spend Limits, and BYOK are still beta with documented rough edges

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    🔒 Security & Compliance Comparison

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    Security FeaturePortkeyCloudflare AI Gateway
    SOC2—✅ Yes
    GDPR—✅ Yes
    HIPAA—❌ No
    SSO—✅ Yes
    Self-Hosted——
    On-Prem—❌ No
    RBAC—✅ Yes
    Audit Log—✅ Yes
    Open Source—❌ No
    API Key Auth—✅ Yes
    Encryption at Rest—✅ Yes
    Encryption in Transit—✅ Yes
    Data Residency—GLOBAL
    Data Retention—configurable
    🦞

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    Read the full reviews to make an informed decision

    Review PortkeyReview Cloudflare AI Gateway