Portkey is an AI gateway — your LLM calls route through its cloud. Peekr is an in-process SDK — it observes and governs those same calls inside your own process, with no proxy, zero added latency, and nothing leaving your stack. Here's the honest head-to-head, including where Portkey is the better tool.
No credit card · MIT license · 17 compliance packs on Pro
The architecture
This isn't a list of flaws — both designs are reasonable. The question is whether you can, or want to, route production LLM traffic through a third party.
The gateway / proxy model — Portkey
Peekr — in-process
Side by side
Green where a capability is present, ✗ where it isn't offered, and — where it's partial. We've kept Portkey's real strengths in the table on purpose.
| Capability | Portkey | Peekr |
|---|---|---|
| Architecture | AI gateway / proxy | In-process SDK |
| Added latency | ~20–40ms proxy hop* | Zero added latency |
| Where your data goes | Through Portkey's cloud | Stays in your process |
| Failure domain | Shared hosted gateway | Your own process only |
| License / self-host | —OSS gateway; certs Enterprise-only | MIT, self-host in your VPC |
| Multi-model routing across 1600+ models | Yes | Not offered |
| Centralized spend caps & governance | Yes | not a routing or spend-control plane |
| Claim-level hallucination detection | Not offered | every sentence scored |
| Regulatory compliance packs in-process | —certs/BAA Enterprise-gated | 17 packs on $99 Pro |
| Entry paid price | $49/mo | $29/mo |
| Integration model | Unified gateway API | Python + TS SDK, in-process |
* Proxy-hop latency is added by construction; ~20–40ms figures come from independent benchmarks and vary by region and configuration. Neither tool is "insecure" — these are architectural trade-offs, not faults.
A neutral note on timing
It's a reasonable moment to evaluate independence.
Portkey was acquired by Palo Alto Networks — announced 30 April 2026, completed 29 May 2026 — and is folding into Prisma AIRS as its AI gateway. That's a credible home for a gateway, and nothing about it makes Portkey a worse product today. Independent analysts simply framed a roughly 12–18 month window in which teams tend to re-evaluate a newly acquired vendor. If your architecture lets you keep observability and compliance in your own process, you carry less of that re-evaluation risk — whichever gateway you route through.
Pricing
Both have a free tier and custom Enterprise pricing. The split that matters: Peekr's 17 compliance packs ship on the $99 Pro plan, while Portkey's compliance certifications and private deployment are Enterprise-only.
Portkey
10k logs/mo · 3-day log retention
+ $9 per extra 100k requests · 100k logs · 30-day retention
SOC2 / GDPR / HIPAA / BAA · VPC / private deployment
Peekr
10k spans/mo · claim-level hallucination scoring
500k spans
5M spans · all 17 compliance packs
Custom volume · self-host in your own VPC
Where Portkey wins
Peekr is not a multi-model gateway, and we won't pretend otherwise. If any of these is your core need, Portkey's gateway does the job and Peekr does not.
You need one API to many models
If you want to call 1600+ models behind a single unified API — and switch providers without touching code — that is Portkey's whole job. Peekr does not aggregate providers.
You want routing, fallbacks & caching
Centralized load-balancing, automatic fallbacks, retries, and response caching live in the gateway request path. An in-process library like Peekr can't fail over to another provider for you.
You govern spend across many teams
Budget and spend caps, prompt management, and multi-team RBAC/SSO from one control plane are exactly what a mature, well-resourced gateway is built to do. Peekr is an in-process observability and compliance SDK, not a centralized spend-control plane.
Plenty of teams run both: Portkey's gateway for routing across providers, Peekr in-process for claim-level hallucination detection and regulatory compliance that can't leave their stack.
FAQ
For observability and compliance, yes. Peekr traces every LLM call, scores claims for hallucination, and enforces 17 regulatory packs in-process — without routing your traffic through anyone's cloud. But Peekr is not an AI gateway: if your reason for using Portkey is unified routing across 1600+ models, fallbacks, and centralized spend control, Peekr does not replace that part.
No. Peekr is an in-process SDK, not a proxy or router. It does not unify many providers behind one API, do load-balancing across models, or act as a single spend-control plane for many teams — that is exactly what Portkey's gateway is built for. Peekr observes and governs the calls your code already makes.
No. Peekr patches the OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, and Bedrock clients at the class level and observes calls inside your own process. Your prompts, responses, and provider API keys never leave your stack, and there is no proxy hop in the request path. A gateway, by contrast, routes your traffic through its cloud by design.
Peekr's entry paid plan is $29/mo (Starter, 500k spans) versus Portkey's $49/mo Production plan. Compliance is the bigger gap: Peekr ships 17 regulatory packs on the $99 Pro plan, while Portkey's compliance certifications and private deployment are Enterprise-only. Both offer a free tier and custom Enterprise pricing.
Yes. The Peekr SDK is MIT-licensed and runs entirely inside your own process, so you can self-host in your own VPC with no traffic leaving your stack. Portkey also offers an open-source, self-hostable gateway, though its compliance and private-deployment options sit behind the Enterprise tier.
Two lines of Python. No proxy, no added latency, MIT-licensed. Free up to 10k spans/month.