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PATCHPATCH /compare/portkey-vs-kong-ai-gateway

Portkey vs Kong AI Gateway

Two LLM gateways with overlapping features and very different price floors.

Feature overlap

Portkey: provider routing, semantic cache, prompt versioning, guardrails, virtual keys. Kong AI Gateway: AI Proxy, AI Prompt Guard, AI Semantic Cache, plus full Kong policy machinery.

Self-host paths

Portkey OSS gateway is MIT-licensed. Kong AI Gateway plugins run on Kong OSS. Both self-host paths are free at the binary level; both carry the same ops overhead as the underlying gateway.

Primary sources
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Verified 20 June 2026 Oliver Wakefield-Smith, Founder, Digital Signet we mark quote when a vendor does not publish, and stop.