Helicone vs Portkey Gateway (self-hosted)
Both are alternatives to Portkey. Here's how they stack up — verified facts, no spin.
Also searched as Portkey Gateway (self-hosted) vs Helicone — same comparison, one verdict.
Helicone
Apache-2.0 gateway in Rust, with observability built in rather than bolted on.
Helicone is an open-source AI gateway written in Rust, with logging, caching and cost tracking built into the routing layer rather than added alongside it — which is the practical difference from LiteLLM, where observability is thin and usually paired with something else. It is Apache-2.0 throughout, self-hostable, and also offered as a hosted service with a free tier. For teams who want one component instead of two, it is the tidier answer.
Portkey Gateway (self-hosted)
Portkey's own routing engine, MIT-licensed and running on your hardware.
Worth knowing before you buy the platform: Portkey publishes its gateway as open source under the MIT licence, so the routing engine — 250+ models, failover, load balancing, caching — can be self-hosted at no cost. What the subscription adds is the hosted control plane: dashboards, prompt management, guardrails, analytics and support. If your requirement is the routing and not the console, this is the same engine without the bill or the third-party data path.
Side by side
| Helicone | Portkey Gateway (self-hosted) | |
|---|---|---|
| Sovereignty Score | 88 | 86 |
| Open source | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hostable | Yes | Yes |
| Local-first | Yes | Yes |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Pricing | Free and self-hostable under Apache-2.0. The hosted service has a free tier of roughly 10,000 requests per month, with paid plans starting around $79/month. | Free — the gateway is MIT-licensed. You pay only your model providers and your own hosting. |
Helicone edges it on the Sovereignty Score, but the right pick depends on the trade-offs below.
Helicone
Strengths
- +Apache-2.0 with no enterprise-directory carve-out
- +Routing and observability in one component — less to assemble
- +Written in Rust; low latency overhead for a proxy
- +Hosted option with a real free tier if you would rather not run it
Trade-offs
- −Smaller project and community than LiteLLM (about 6k stars)
- −Fewer providers supported than LiteLLM's 100+
- −The hosted tier means prompts transit a third party — the thing self-hosting avoided
- −Less mature budget and virtual-key tooling than LiteLLM
Portkey Gateway (self-hosted)
Strengths
- +MIT licence on the full routing engine
- +Same 250+ model coverage as the hosted product
- +The lowest-friction exit from Portkey's paid tier — same engine, same config shape
- +No third party in the request path when self-hosted
Trade-offs
- −You lose the dashboards, prompt management and guardrails that justify the subscription
- −Development cadence is slower than LiteLLM's
- −Smaller self-hosting community, so fewer worked examples when something breaks
- −You are self-hosting a vendor's open core — feature direction still follows their commercial product
Related alternative guides
Facts verified 2026-07-30. Licenses and pricing change — spotted something out of date? That's a correction we want.