Portkey open-sourced its entire gateway under Apache 2.0 in 2026 and prices its managed tier under Preto's. If you're comparing on price alone, Portkey wins that comparison — and pretending otherwise wouldn't be useful to you. The actual decision is about what job each tool is built to do, not which one costs less on a list-price basis.
1. Portkey is currently the cheaper option on list price, and its core gateway is fully open source.
2. Portkey's strength is routing, fallback, and load balancing across providers. Preto's strength is cost intelligence — ranked recommendations and hard budget enforcement.
3. These aren't strictly competing tools — teams often use a routing-focused gateway alongside a cost-focused layer, similar to how observability and cost tooling coexist.
On pricing, directly: Portkey offers a free tier and a $49/month Production plan (100K logs, then $9 per additional 100K). Preto's Pro tier is $99/month. If your primary need is a routing gateway and budget is the deciding factor, that price gap is real and worth weighing. This comparison is about what each tool does, not a claim that one is a better deal in isolation.
What Portkey Is Built For
Portkey is a routing and observability gateway — multi-provider routing, fallback logic across OpenAI, Anthropic, and others, load balancing, and unified logging, with the entire gateway open-sourced under Apache 2.0. It sits in the request path, which means it can make real-time routing decisions, not just observe after the fact. For teams whose primary need is reliable multi-provider routing with solid observability, Portkey is a strong, well-built option — and now a free one if you're willing to self-host.
What Preto Is Built For
Preto also sits in the request path, but the emphasis is different: ranked, dollar-estimated savings recommendations generated from your actual traffic patterns, hard budget enforcement that can block a request when a workspace exceeds its cap (not just alert about it), and a savings-tracked number as a first-class dashboard metric rather than a byproduct of logging. The gateway position is a means to an end — cost intelligence — rather than the primary product itself.
Side by Side
| Capability | Portkey | Preto |
|---|---|---|
| Multi-provider routing & fallback | Yes — core strength | Yes |
| Load balancing | Yes | Basic |
| Open source core | Yes, Apache 2.0 | No |
| List price (entry paid tier) | $49/mo | $99/mo |
| Ranked savings recommendations | Not the focus | Yes, with dollar estimates |
| Hard budget enforcement | Verify current support | Yes, at the proxy |
| Savings tracked as dashboard metric | No | Yes |
| Cost attribution by feature/user | Logging-based | First-class |
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When Portkey Is the Right Call
If routing reliability, multi-provider fallback, and self-hosted flexibility are the primary requirements — and cost is being managed through simpler means, like periodic manual review — Portkey's combination of a mature open-source gateway and competitive managed pricing is a genuinely strong choice. Don't switch away from a routing setup that's working well just to chase a cost-intelligence feature you might not need yet.
When the Cost-Intelligence Layer Earns Its Place
The gap shows up once LLM spend crosses into a real budget line item — typically five figures a month — where the 20-40% avoidable waste rate common across production traffic starts to mean real money, and where a hard budget block (not just a routing decision) becomes the thing that prevents a bad week from becoming a bad quarter. At that point, the question isn't "which gateway is cheaper" — it's "does anything in my stack tell me specifically what to fix, and can anything stop a runaway spend before it happens." If the honest answer is no, that's the gap Preto is built to close, on top of whichever routing layer you're already running.
For the broader landscape this comparison sits in, see the full 2026 LLMOps category map — Portkey's open-source move is one of several consolidation signals covered there.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Can I use Preto and Portkey together?
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