Portkey vs Langfuse
Enterprise AI gateway + observability + guardrails + prompt mgmt
vs. Open-source LLM engineering platform — observability, prompts, evals
Pricing tiers
Portkey
Developer (Free)
Free forever. 10k logs/month. Universal API + key management. 3 prompt templates. Basic observability.
Free
Gateway (OSS)
MIT-licensed gateway only (no observability UI). Self-host for routing/fallbacks.
$0 base (usage-based)
Production
$49/month. 100k logs ($9 per additional 100k). Fallbacks, load balancing, retries, semantic caching. Unlimited prompts. RBAC.
$49/mo
Enterprise
Custom. 10M+ logs/month. Custom guardrails, advanced evals, SSO, budget controls, VPC + on-prem, SOC2, HIPAA, GDPR.
Custom
Langfuse
Hobby (Cloud Free)
Free. 50k units/month included. 30 days data access. 2 users. Community support.
Free
Self-Hosted (OSS)
MIT-licensed. Docker Compose or Kubernetes deployment. Unlimited.
$0 base (usage-based)
Core
$29/month. 100k units included ($8 per 100k overage). 90 days retention. Unlimited users. In-app support.
$29/mo
Pro
$199/month. 100k units included + same overage. 3 YEARS retention. Unlimited annotation queues. High rate limits.
$199/mo
Teams Add-on
+$300/month. Adds Enterprise SSO + fine-grained RBAC + dedicated Slack support to Pro.
$300/mo
Enterprise
$2,499/month. Everything + custom rate limits, uptime SLA, dedicated support engineer. Yearly options.
$2499/mo
Free-tier quotas head-to-head
Comparing free on Portkey vs hobby on Langfuse.
| Metric | Portkey | Langfuse |
|---|---|---|
| No overlapping quota metrics for these tiers. | ||
Features
Portkey · 18 features
- AI Gateway — Unified OpenAI-compatible API to 250+ LLMs.
- Alerts — Thresholds on latency, error rate, cost, usage.
- Budget Controls — Per-key + per-team spending limits.
- Evaluations — Built-in evaluator templates + custom.
- Fallbacks — Config-driven provider fallback chains.
- Guardrails — Pre/post processors for safety + compliance.
- Load Balancing — Round-robin, weighted, least-latency across providers.
- MCP Support — Use MCP servers as tools through gateway.
- Observability — Logs, traces, feedback, alerts, cost tracking.
- OSS Gateway — Open-source gateway (portkey-ai/gateway).
- Prompt Library — Shared prompt library + public marketplace.
- Prompt Templates — Version + test + collaborate on prompts.
- Retries — Configurable retry policies per route.
- Role-Based Access Control — Team permissions on prompts + keys.
- Semantic Caching — Vector-based cache on query meaning.
- Simple Caching — Exact-match cache.
- Virtual Keys — Per-app keys with budget + rate limits + permissions.
- VPC Deployment (Ent) — Deploy in your own VPC for compliance.
Langfuse · 16 features
- Annotation Queues — Human reviewers rate traces. Unlimited on Pro+.
- Dashboards — Aggregate metrics, cost, quality across projects.
- Datasets — Curate test sets from production traces. Run experiments.
- EU Cloud Region — GDPR-compliant hosting in EU.
- Evaluations — LLM-as-judge, manual scores, custom model-graded evaluators.
- LLM Cost Tracking — Automatic cost calculation per provider/model.
- OpenTelemetry Native — OTel SDK → Langfuse endpoint works out of box.
- Playground — Test prompts + models + variables live.
- Prompt Management — Version, tag, label prompts. Reference from code by label.
- Public API — Full REST API for ingest, query, prompt management.
- Python @observe decorator — One-line decorator to trace any function.
- Self-Hosting — Docker Compose + k8s Helm chart.
- Sessions — Group related traces (conversations, agent runs).
- Tracing — Capture every LLM call, tool call, nested span with inputs/outputs/cost.
- Users Tracking — Segment traces by user ID, track per-user cost.
- Webhooks — Subscribe to trace completion events.
Developer interfaces
| Kind | Portkey | Langfuse |
|---|---|---|
| CLI | Portkey CLI | — |
| SDK | portkey-ai (Node), portkey-ai (Python) | langfuse-js, langfuse-python |
| REST | Portkey API (OpenAI-compat) | Langfuse REST API |
| MCP | Portkey MCP | Langfuse MCP Server |
| OTHER | Portkey Dashboard | Langfuse Dashboard, OpenTelemetry endpoint |
Staxly is an independent catalog of developer platforms. Outbound links to Portkey and Langfuse are plain references to their official websites. Pricing is verified against vendor pages at publication time — reconfirm before buying.
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