Agentic Index
Helicone vs Portkey (2026)
Choose Helicone for an open source LLM observability gateway with self serve pricing, and choose Portkey for a fuller production control plane spanning routing, guardrails, governance, and an MCP gateway. That verdict is the Agentic Index coverage score, graded from each vendor's own published materials.
Helicone runs from 79 dollars a month with a free tier of 10,000 requests a month plus an open source core, while Portkey offers a free tier and Production at 49 dollars a month with 100,000 recorded logs. Both have changed hands. Mintlify acquired Helicone in March 2026, and Helicone says it now runs in maintenance mode, with security updates, new model support and fixes still shipping. Portkey now sits inside a security giant, which strengthens its enterprise story and changes its roadmap incentives.
On the Agentic Index agent infrastructure ranking, Portkey clears the bar and Helicone does not. Portkey documents all five production contract capabilities in full; Helicone does not document security and identity governance in full, nor testing, debugging and optimization. 34 of the 186 vendors in the lane clear it. See the agent infrastructure ranking
This comparison is published by Agentic Index, an independent agentic AI vendor research platform. Helicone and Portkey are each graded against the same 14 capability Agentic Index taxonomy, from the vendor's own public materials under the Agentic Index verification standard, alongside 956 researched vendors. No vendor pays for placement and no vendor has reviewed this page. How this evidence is graded
Choose Helicone if
- You want logging, caching, and cost tracking through one endpoint with minimal ceremony
- Choosing where request logs live, EU or US cloud or your own infrastructure, is a requirement
- Your gateway needs are observability first rather than governance first
Choose Portkey if
- Guardrails, RBAC, and budget governance across teams are day one requirements
- An MCP gateway alongside LLM routing consolidates your agent traffic control
- Security platform integration under Palo Alto Networks is an asset for your buyers
| At a glance | Helicone | Portkey |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Agent infrastructure | Agent infrastructure |
| Entry price | From $79/mo · free tier (10k requests/mo) + open source | Free Developer plan · Production $49/mo · open source gateway free to self-host |
| Free / trial | Free Hobby plan: 10,000 requests a month, 1 GB storage, 1 seat, 7-day retention, no card; 7-day free trial of Pro and Team; open source and self-hostable | Developer plan free forever (10K recorded logs a month); open source gateway free to self-host |
| Pricing confidence | public exact | public exact |
| Feature | H Helicone |
P Portkey |
|---|---|---|
| Action & orchestration | ||
|
Integrations & Tool Calling Ability to connect agents to real systems through native integrations, OAuth-authenticated actions, custom tools, APIs, webhooks, or MCP-compatible tools. |
Partial | Full / Explicit |
|
Workflow Orchestration Ability to sequence, branch, retry, route, and combine deterministic workflow nodes with autonomous agent steps. |
No / Not documented | No / Not documented |
|
Triggers & Channel Coverage How agents wake up and where they work: schedules, webhooks, message events, CRM events, inbox events, chat, email, voice, and collaboration tools. |
Full / Explicit | No / Not documented |
| Knowledge & context | ||
|
Knowledge Grounding & RAG Ability to ground agent behavior in company data through document ingestion, retrieval, external knowledge APIs, semantic search, or RAG layers. |
No / Not documented | No / Not documented |
|
Memory & State Persistence Ability to persist context across a run, conversation, workflow, user, team, or longer-term memory layer. |
No / Not documented | No / Not documented |
| Control & trust | ||
|
Human Oversight & Guardrails Approval steps, consent checkpoints, escalation rules, structured guardrails, policy constraints, and pause/resume controls. |
Full / Explicit | Partial |
|
Security, Identity & Governance RBAC, SSO, auditability, encryption, least-privilege tool access, compliance posture, and data handling policy. |
Full / Explicit | Full / Explicit |
|
Observability & Auditability Traces, logs, execution histories, metrics, audit events, and debugging detail for production agent behavior. |
Full / Explicit | Full / Explicit |
|
Deployment & Data Residency Deployment modes and options, including SaaS, dedicated cloud, VPC, on-prem, hybrid, local runtime, and self-hosting. |
Full / Explicit | Full / Explicit |
| Solution readiness | ||
|
Prebuilt Agents, Templates & Packs Ready-made workflows, packaged employees, templates, blueprints, industry solutions, and role-specific agents that reduce time-to-value. |
No / Not documented | No / Not documented |
| Platform extensibility | ||
|
Model Flexibility & Routing Ability to work across multiple foundation models, route tasks to different models, or let buyers bring their own providers and keys. |
Full / Explicit | Full / Explicit |
|
APIs, SDKs & MCP Extensibility Composability layer: stable APIs, SDKs, MCP tool consumption/serving, custom tools, and integration into internal systems. |
Full / Explicit | Full / Explicit |
|
Testing, Debugging & Optimization Testing, debugging, scoring, retries, fallbacks, quality gates, and optimization loops for improving agent workflows before and after deployment. |
Partial | Full / Explicit |
| Specialist automation | ||
|
Browser & Computer Use Browser, desktop, or remote/local computer control for workflows that cannot be handled through stable APIs alone. |
No / Not documented | No / Not documented |
Pricing snapshot
Sourced from the Index pricing dataset · open each vendor's profile for full detail.
| Pricing | H Helicone |
P Portkey |
|---|---|---|
|
Entry price Lowest public entry point |
From $79/mo · free tier (10k requests/mo) + open source | Free Developer plan · Production $49/mo · open source gateway free to self-host |
|
Pricing confidence How public the numbers are |
Public, exact | Public, exact |
|
Billing Primary billing axis |
Subscription tiers by features and seats, with usage based scaling above included request volume; AI Gateway billed as zero markup provider pass through | usage |
|
Variable cost Workload / overage exposure |
Medium variable cost | Medium variable cost |
|
Free tier / trial Try before you buy |
Free tierTrial
|
Free tier
|
|
Buying motion Self-serve vs sales call |
Mixed | Mixed |
Helicone was acquired by Mintlify in March 2026 and runs in maintenance mode, which it describes as security updates, new models, and bug and performance fixes continuing. Portkey was acquired by Palo Alto Networks in May 2026 and now anchors the AI Gateway layer of the Prisma AIRS security platform. Buyers outside the Palo Alto Networks ecosystem should weigh roadmap priorities accordingly.
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