Portkey Gateway (self-hosted)
Portkey's own routing engine, MIT-licensed and running on your hardware.
86
sovereigntyWorth 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.
OPEN SOURCEMITSELF-HOSTLOCAL-FIRST
LicenseMIT
PricingFree — the gateway is MIT-licensed. You pay only your model providers and your own hosting.
Open sourceYes
Self-hostableYes
Local-first dataYes
What it does well
- +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
Where it falls short
- −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
Portkey Gateway (self-hosted) as an alternative to
Where Portkey Gateway (self-hosted) shows up in our comparisons, and how it ranked.
Portkey Gateway (self-hosted) head-to-head
Straight comparisons against the tools people weigh it against.