Portkey vs OpenRouter: which should you use?
Choose Portkey, now Palo Alto Networks' Prisma AIRS AI Gateway, when you have provider contracts and need governance on top: logs, guardrails, budgets and conditional routing, from free to $49 a month plus your provider bills. Choose OpenRouter for one key and one bill across 500+ models at list price plus 5.5% on credits, with an automatic router.
Two different products
| Portkey | OpenRouter | |
|---|---|---|
| What you buy | A gateway and its logs; tokens come from your providers | Tokens from 80+ providers through one account |
| Price | Free to 10,000 logs; Production $49 a month for 100,000; Enterprise custom | List price plus 5.5% on card credit purchases ($0.80 minimum), 8% on Business |
| Your own keys | Required | Free up to $25,000 of list-price use a month, then 5% |
| Model choice | Conditional routing, fallbacks and load balancing you configure | openrouter/auto ranks models by community spend per task type; pareto-code picks the cheapest above a coding score |
| Spend caps | Per key and workspace on Enterprise and select Pro customers | Credit limit per key with daily, weekly or monthly reset, every plan |
| Compliance | SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA and VPC hosting on Enterprise | EU and US in-region routing on Business and Enterprise |
| Owner | Palo Alto Networks since May 2026 | Stripe agreed to acquire it on August 19, 2026 |
| Claude Code | Base URL api.portkey.ai plus a provider header | Base URL openrouter.ai/api; guaranteed only with Anthropic as provider |
From portkey.ai/pricing, Portkey docs, openrouter.ai/pricing, OpenRouter docs and Stripe's announcement, October 13, 2026.
One developer's coding-agent month
Portkey is the cheaper way to reach Anthropic if you already have an account there, and OpenRouter the simpler one if you don't. Neither changes the token bill much. OpenRouter's auto router can, by picking a model per prompt; on Portkey you would write that logic as routing conditions.
| Month on Claude Sonnet 5.5 | Portkey | OpenRouter | Standard Compute |
|---|---|---|---|
| Typical days | $71 to Anthropic, $0 to Portkey | $74 | Standard, $89 ($95 budget) |
| Busy days | $579 to Anthropic, plus your share of $49 | $611 | Pro Plus, $499 ($549 budget) |
Typical and busy are the median and 90th-percentile coding-agent day in our Agent Burn Index (September 13 to October 12, 2026; Claude Code and Codex not in the sample), over 20 working days. Portkey's Developer plan covers one developer's logs; a team on busy days needs Production. Standard Compute plans stop at their budget; routing routine steps to efficient models makes it last longer.
Which to choose
- Choose Portkey when a platform or security team governs every LLM call in the company, you have negotiated provider rates, or prompts must stay in your VPC.
- Choose OpenRouter when you want to try many models on one key, need a free tier, or want a router to pick the model.
- Choose Standard Compute for coding agents on a fixed monthly price: compute included, a model chosen per request to stretch the budget, a plan per key for teams and agencies, and requests that stop at the budget.
The catch
Portkey's own OpenRouter comparison mentions cost-based routing, but its docs describe only conditions, fallbacks and weights you set. Read the docs page before you count on a feature from a comparison page, ours included.
Where Standard Compute fits
Like OpenRouter, Standard Compute is one key with the compute included; like Portkey, every key gets a limit. Where it differs is cost: a plan from $19 a month whose router decides per request whether a step needs a frontier model.
FAQ
Is Portkey an OpenRouter alternative?
Partly. Both put one API in front of many models, but OpenRouter sells the tokens and Portkey doesn't: on Portkey you connect your own provider keys and pay each provider.
Which is cheaper, Portkey or OpenRouter?
With your own Anthropic or OpenAI account, Portkey: its Developer plan is free and Production is $49 a month, against OpenRouter's 5.5% on credits. OpenRouter is also free on your own keys up to $25,000 of use a month.
Does Portkey have an auto router like OpenRouter?
No. Portkey routes by conditions, fallbacks and load-balancing weights you configure. OpenRouter's openrouter/auto picks a model per prompt.
Who owns Portkey and OpenRouter now?
Palo Alto Networks closed its Portkey acquisition on May 29, 2026. Stripe announced an agreement to acquire OpenRouter on August 19, 2026; OpenRouter says it will keep operating under its own name.