Comparison
Portkey vs Keybrake
Two proxies, two jobs. Portkey governs what your agent sends to OpenAI and Anthropic. Keybrake governs what it sends to Stripe and Twilio. The direct head-to-head for teams sizing up both.
Quick verdict
- Choose Portkey if: you want a managed AI gateway — virtual keys, budget caps, fallback routing, prompt caching, a polished observability dashboard — for your LLM traffic.
- Choose Keybrake if: the dollars that scare you leave the agent on a Stripe charge, a Twilio SMS, or a Resend email. Per-vendor USD caps, endpoint allowlists, customer scope, sub-5-second revoke.
- Choose both if: your production agent does inference AND money-moving tool calls. That's most serious 2026 deployments.
Side by side
| Portkey | Keybrake | |
|---|---|---|
| Category | AI gateway (managed SaaS) | SaaS-API governance proxy (managed SaaS) |
| Vendors governed | OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, 200+ LLMs | Stripe, Twilio, Resend (+ Shopify, Postmark roadmap) |
| Virtual / vault keys | Virtual keys per app/user; per-key budgets | Vault keys per agent/run; per-vendor policy bundles |
| Spend cap unit | USD/day/key, token-cost-table derived | USD/day/vendor/key, vendor-response parsed |
| Endpoint / scope allowlist | Model allowlist | Endpoint allowlist + Stripe customer / Connect account scope |
| Fallback routing | Yes — first-class routing DSL | No (SaaS calls are mutating; fallback is the wrong primitive) |
| Caching | Semantic + prompt caching | No (see above) |
| Mid-run revoke | Yes | Yes; median < 5s on next request |
| Audit log shape | Prompt / completion / tokens / cost / latency | Vendor / endpoint / params / parsed cost / policy result / latency |
| Pricing model | Free tier; scaled pricing by request volume | Free (1k req/mo); Team $99/mo (100k req); Scale custom |
| Best for | AI-ops engineer managing LLM spend across teams | Ops-risk / finance engineer worried about SaaS runaway |
Detailed differences
Cost accounting: token tables vs vendor responses
Portkey derives per-request cost from a table of model-name → cost-per-token multiplied by the response's token counts. Keybrake derives per-request cost from parsing the vendor's own response: Stripe's amount + fee on the charge object, Twilio's price field on a message, Resend's flat per-email rate. The two are architecturally different code paths; neither tool can serve the other's traffic correctly.
Scope: models vs customers
Portkey lets you say "this virtual key can call GPT-4o but not GPT-4o-realtime". Keybrake lets you say "this vault key can charge customer cus_abc123 but not anybody else" or "this vault key can POST to /v1/charges but not to /v1/payouts". Different abstractions for different threat models.
Caching
Portkey's semantic and prompt caching is a big value-add for LLM workloads where the same prompt arrives repeatedly. Keybrake deliberately has no cache — a Stripe charge or a Twilio SMS can't be served from cache, and caching read-only Stripe resources at the proxy layer is the kind of convenience that causes real incidents (stale balances, stale customer records). We leave read-only caching to your application.
Running both, concretely
Agent hits two base URLs: api.portkey.ai/v1 with a Portkey virtual key for LLMs, proxy.keybrake.com with a Keybrake vault key for SaaS tools. Both receive the same x-agent-run-id request header. Post-hoc SQL against either log joins on that column to give you full-run cost visibility. See the longer positioning piece for diagrams.
Try Keybrake
If you already run Portkey for LLMs, adding Keybrake for SaaS traffic is a base-URL change plus a vault key. Five minutes.