LiteLLM vs Portkey

How much gateway do you actually need

Both sit between your application and the model providers, and the meaningful difference is how much of the surrounding platform comes with them. One is primarily a normalisation and routing layer you compose with your own observability and governance; the other bundles more of that platform. The right choice depends on how much of the surrounding stack you already have and intend to keep.

A team with an existing tracing stack, an existing secrets story and an existing way of managing cost attribution usually wants the thinner thing, because a bundled platform duplicates what they run and creates two places to look during an incident. A team with none of those, and no platform engineer to build them, gets more value from the bundle than from assembling the pieces — provided they are comfortable with where that platform runs and what it sees.

The question worth asking before either is what you would do if the component failed. A gateway sits on the critical path of every model call, so its availability becomes your availability. If you run it yourself, that means capacity, upgrades and an on-call rotation. If it is managed, it means a dependency you cannot fix at three in the morning. Both are acceptable answers and neither is free, which is why the decision belongs to whoever owns production rather than to whoever is choosing the SDK.

Where each one genuinely wins

• —Portkey genuinely wins when you want gateway, observability and governance as one managed thing and do not have the team to assemble them. Arriving with the surrounding platform already built is worth a lot when the alternative is six weeks of integration work you cannot staff.
• —LiteLLM genuinely wins on composability and control. If you already run your own observability and want the gateway to be a thin, replaceable component inside your infrastructure, a library you operate is a better fit than a platform that expects to own that layer.