Portkey vs Langfuse
A detailed comparison to help you choose between Portkey and Langfuse.
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Verdict: Langfuse wins
Langfuse scores 4.3/5, edging out Portkey at 4.0/5. Engineering teams running LLM apps or agents in production who want framework-agnostic tracing and evaluation with either a cheap managed cloud or a free self-hosted stack.
Portkey AI gateway for production LLM apps | Langfuse Open-source LLM observability and evaluation | |
|---|---|---|
| Rating | 4.0 (1 review) | 4.3 (1 review) |
| Pricing Model | freemium | freemium |
| Starting Price | Free tier available | Free tier available |
| Best For | Platform and LLM-infrastructure engineers who want one governed, OpenAI-compatible entry point for multi-provider model traffic in production. | Engineering teams running LLM apps or agents in production who want framework-agnostic tracing and evaluation with either a cheap managed cloud or a free self-hosted stack. |
| Free Tier | ||
| API Access | ||
| Team Features | ||
| Open Source | ||
| Tags | free tierapi accessopen sourcebyok | free tieropen sourceapi access |
| Visit Portkey → | Visit Langfuse → |
Portkey
Pros
- + OpenAI-compatible endpoint at api.portkey.ai/v1 let me swap providers via a header change with no SDK rewrite
- + Fallbacks fired within the same request cycle in my fault-injection test — the client never saw the upstream failure
- + MIT-licensed gateway self-hosts free (12.8k GitHub stars); hosted Production starts at $49/month for 100K logged requests at time of writing (portkey.ai/pricing)
- + 40+ built-in guardrails apply one policy across every downstream provider instead of per-SDK rules
- + Developer tier is free forever and sufficient for prototyping: 10K recorded logs/month (portkey.ai/pricing)
Cons
- - Log-metered pricing climbs fast: at list, 10M recorded requests computes to roughly $949/month on Production (leanroute.dev, at time of writing)
- - Free Developer tier keeps logs only 3 days and stops recording after 10K logs — debugging history disappears
- - SSO, granular budget limits, and VPC deployment are Enterprise-only
- - May 2026 acquisition by Palo Alto Networks puts roadmap and pricing power in a security vendor's hands
- - Semantic caching and the observability dashboards are hosted-only; self-hosters get routing and guardrails alone
Langfuse
Pros
- + MIT-licensed core with free, unrestricted self-hosting — only named enterprise features like audit logs and SCIM need a licence key
- + A 5-seat team at 100k traces runs roughly $69/month versus about $420/month for the main closed alternative (Panoply's independent estimate, consistent with my bills)
- + OpenTelemetry-native tracing across OpenAI SDK, LangChain, LlamaIndex, Pydantic AI, Vercel AI SDK, CrewAI and raw OTLP
- + Graduated usage pricing is transparent and cheap: worked examples on the pricing page match my own invoices (200k units on Core = $37/month)
- + Dataset-backed evaluation with the langfuse/experiment-action GitHub step let me gate prompt changes in CI on a real test set
Cons
- - v3 self-hosting needs Postgres, ClickHouse, Redis and S3 where v2 ran on one container — a four-service system to operate
- - Heavy agent traces render slowly in the UI (issue threads #10391 and #9933 match the multi-second loads I measured)
- - Online evaluations score a sample of traffic rather than everything, so rare failure modes can go unscored
- - UI-configured evaluators cannot be triggered programmatically for scheduled pipelines in my setup
- - Owned by ClickHouse, Inc. since January 2026 — licence unchanged so far, but the vendor-independence profile shifted
Frequently Asked Questions
Which is better, Portkey or Langfuse?▼
Langfuse scores higher at 4.3/5 vs 4.0/5 for Portkey, making it the better-rated option in our comparison.
What is the difference between Portkey and Langfuse?▼
Portkey: Portkey is an AI gateway that routes, caches, observes and governs LLM traffic in production. It is now sold as PRISMA AIRS AI Gateway after its acquisition by Palo Alto Networks. Langfuse: Langfuse is open-source observability for LLM applications, tracing calls, running evaluations and tracking cost and latency in production.
Is Portkey or Langfuse more affordable?▼
Portkey starts at €0/mo, Langfuse starts at €0/mo. Check the comparison table above for current pricing.
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