Staxly

Upstash vs Portkey

Serverless Redis + Kafka + Vector + QStash — per-request pricing
vs. Enterprise AI gateway + observability + guardrails + prompt mgmt

Upstash website ↗Portkey website ↗

Pricing tiers

Upstash

Free
Redis: 256 MB + 500k cmds/mo. Vector: 10k queries/mo. QStash: 500 msgs/day.
Free
Pay-as-you-go
Redis: $0.2 per 100k cmds. Vector: $0.4/M queries. QStash: $1 per 100k.
$0 base (usage-based)
Fixed Plans
From $10/mo. 250MB-500GB Redis. $5/read region. 50GB bandwidth included.
$10/mo
Prod Pack
+$200/mo per DB. SLA + RBAC + encryption + SOC-2 + Prometheus + Datadog.
$200/mo
Enterprise
Custom. 100k+ cmd/sec, unlimited bandwidth, HIPAA.
Custom
Upstash website ↗

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
Portkey website ↗

Free-tier quotas head-to-head

Comparing free on Upstash vs free on Portkey.

MetricUpstashPortkey
No overlapping quota metrics for these tiers.

Features

Upstash · 12 features

  • Cron (via QStash) — Scheduled HTTP callbacks on any interval.
  • Edge-Ready — Native for CF Workers, Vercel Edge, Deno, Bun.
  • Global Database — Multi-region Redis reads.
  • HTTP REST APIs — Every product has REST — works from edge runtimes.
  • QStash — HTTP-based message queue + cron scheduler for webhooks.
  • QStash Webhooks — Outgoing webhook delivery with retries + DLQ.
  • Read Regions — Add read replicas in any region ($5/mo each).
  • @upstash/ratelimit — Redis-backed rate limiter lib.
  • Upstash Redis — Serverless Redis with HTTP REST + RESP TCP.
  • Upstash Search — Full-text + semantic search engine.
  • Upstash Vector — Serverless vector DB with REST API. HNSW indexing.
  • Upstash Workflow — Durable workflow runtime built on QStash.

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.

Developer interfaces

KindUpstashPortkey
CLI—Portkey CLI
SDKupstash-redis / vector (Python), @upstash/redis / vector / qstashportkey-ai (Node), portkey-ai (Python)
RESTQStash REST API, Upstash Redis REST API, Upstash Vector RESTPortkey API (OpenAI-compat)
MCP—Portkey MCP
OTHERRESP (TCP)Portkey Dashboard
Staxly is an independent catalog of developer platforms. Some links to Upstash and Portkey may be affiliate links — Staxly may earn a commission if you sign up through them, at no extra cost to you. Pricing is verified against vendor pages at publication time — reconfirm before buying.

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