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Compare TrueFoundry vs Portkey

When TrueFoundry Makes Sense?

Choose TrueFoundry since it provides an integrated enterprise-grade LLM Gateway operating at ultra low latency with Agentic AI buildout and MCP integration

Key Competitive Differentiators
TrueFoundry
Portkey
Gateway Architecture & Performance
Enterprise grade with fast performance of only ~3ms latency at 250 RPS per pod and scales linearly (tens of thousands of RPS with more replicas)
Open-source gateway with decent performance (~20-40ms added latency)
Routing & Reliability
Provides latency-based & weight-based routing with strong fallback and rate limiting features.
Provides routing in a very flexible manner at teams, models, applications etc. level
Built for production reliability with automatic retries, provider failover, and caching.
 Provides routing at workspace level only
Deployment Options
Kubernetes-native deployment in customer’s VPC (your cloud or on-prem)
Can be self-hosted or used as a cloud service; primarily an API middleware (stateless)
LLM Flexibility
Any model, any stack: Deploy and serve open-source LLMs on your infra or route to external APIs as needed. No Bedrock/provider lock-in – one gateway for both local and remote models
Connects to 250+ models (OpenAI, Anthropic, Cohere, etc.) via unified API; fallback routing & multi-provider support
MCP Functionality
MCP Gateway provides unified access to all registered MCP Servers, instant discovery via a central registry, and secure access control with OAuth 2.0 and federated identity providers – Enterprise grade
Limited functionality for MCP integration for enterprise usage
Observability
Full-stack observability: Real-time logs, metrics, traces and UI-based debugging for each deployment. Token-level usage metrics, custom alerts, and Open telemetry compliant metrics which can be easily imported to Datadog, Grafana etc
Built-in request logging, token usage and cost tracking dashboard (real-time). Limited visibility into underlying infra (since it doesn’t host models)
Support
24×7 enterprise support via Slack & on-call
engineers (dedicated AM). Ultra-high customer satisfaction (G2 support rating 9.9/10) Compliance-ready (SOC2, HIPAA) and hands-on onboarding.
Community-driven support (Discord/GitHub for OSS). Enterprise plan offers support SLAs, but overall smaller support setup (startup scale).
Ecosystem Integration
Broad integration: Works within your CI/CD, GitOps pipelines; connects to Kafka/SQS for async pipelines. Plays nicely with cloud services (AWS, GCP) but remains cloud-agnostic. Open APIs to integrate custom tools.
Developer-centric integrations: Ready
connectors for LangChain, LlamaIndex,
Flowise, etc., to plug into LLM apps. Less
integration for non-LLM workflows (e.g., ETL
or CI/CD).
Open-source vs freemium
Freemium model available for developers – who can sign up for free and log upto 50k requests per month.
Open-source community with 8k+ GitHub stars and weekly community calls. Still evolving enterprise presence.

Key Evaluation Questions

Question
How TrueFoundry Fixes It
Portkey considerations
“Are you facing latency or hosting issues?”
A one-stop solution to host open-source LLMs + Gateway layer to connect to external models through APIs.Best in class performance with low latency of ~3ms
No option to host open-source LLMs on their platform. Facing higher latency than expected 
“Can we optimize our LLM usage costs?”
TrueFoundry can cut costs 40–50% by letting you run models on spot instances or GPUs at scale. Teams have saved significantly by hosting open models (e.g. Llama2) in-house versus expensive per call fees. Plus, the platform auto-shuts idle pods to reduce waste.
Using multiple providers via Portkey can prevent overpaying one vendor, and you get cost tracking. However, you still pay per API call (OpenAI, etc.), and hosting local models isn’t automated. Any cost savings from self-hosting require building that infra yourself.
“Are you looking to try more functionalities on MCP servers?”
TrueFoundry MCP Gateway enables agentic task execution across tools, offers enterprise-grade observability with request-level tracing and audit logs, supports out-of-the-box and custom integrations (e.g., Slack, Datadog, internal APIs), and ensures high-performance operation across cloud, on-prem, and hybrid environments.
Portkey provides limited functionality
“Do we have observability and debugging for LLM calls and models?”
TrueFoundry offers end-to-end observability – not only do you get request metrics, but also container logs, live monitoring, and alerts down to the pod level. Developers can debug failures
through a UI, inspect logs in real-time, and even profile models. This holistic view speeds up troubleshooting significantly.
Portkey gives good LLM-level observability (token counts, latencies, errors) via its dashboard. But it won’t trace issues inside a custom model container –
that’s outside its scope. Debugging infrastructure failures or performance bottlenecks in your own model server is manual.
“Will we outgrow the platform’s capabilities?”
TrueFoundry’s platform is extensible and modular. It covers from model training to serving to monitoring. As your use-cases grow (streaming inference, hybrid workloads, new models), TrueFoundry adapts – it’s not limited to LLMs. This future-proofs your stack and avoids painful tool migrations later.
Portkey is focused on LLM inference. If your needs expand to full ML lifecycle (data prep, training, non-LLM models, custom microservices), you’ll need additional tools. It’s one puzzle piece, so growth means integrating more solutions.

How TrueFoundry acts as a Painkiller

Key Painpoints
Benefits of using TrueFoundry
Customer Impact
Fragmented LLM Infrastructure
Unified platform for both model serving and
LLM API gateway – one solution handles it all.
Eliminates glue code and context-switching,
allowing the team to focus on building
features, not integrating tools.
Multiple platforms to manage; Fractured workflows and duplicated efforts. Devs spend time stitching together hosting, gateway, monitoring tools.
Slow Deployment & Iteration Cycles
Self-serve deployments in days or hours –
no heavy DevOps dependency. TrueFoundry
automates environment setup, scaling, and
routing, so teams achieve rapid iteration and
hit release timelines consistently (80%+ time
reduction).
Data scientists wait on engineering; weeks or months to production. Missed go-live targets are common. Experimentation slows down due to long infra setup for each model.
Uncontrolled Cloud Costs
Intelligent cost optimization: Kubernetes-based orchestration packs workloads efficiently, yielding 35–50% TCO savings vs. naive approaches. Plus, ability to host your own models means reduced reliance on pricey API providers, directly cutting variable costs.
Budget overruns and surprise bills; management puts projects on hold due to costs. Running open-source models in the cloud without optimization leads to paying for idle resources or overpriced instances.
Limited Visibility & Debugging
Deep observability built-in: real-time logs,
detailed error traces, and performance metrics
for every request. TrueFoundry’s UI and alerts
enable quick root-cause analysis (whether it’s
a bad prompt, a slow model, or infrastructure
glitch), minimizing downtime and improving
reliability.
Blind spots in production – teams struggle to pinpoint issues with prompts or model performance. Minimal logging from external APIs; homegrown model servers lack unified monitoring, leading to prolonged downtimes.
Ongoing Ops & Maintenance Burden
Managed ops: TrueFoundry handles the
heavy lifting of K8s ops – automated updates,
scaling, rollouts, and health checks. Fewer
infra touchpoints mean Data Science and
Platform teams collaborate smoothly with far
less friction. Your team spends time on ML
tasks, not on babysitting infrastructure.
High DevOps toil: engineers constantly tune infrastructure, update docker images, manage scaling policies. This detracts from feature development and can introduce errors. Friction between ML and Ops teams grows.
Vendor/Platform Lock-In Fears
Flexibility and no lock-in: TrueFoundry is
cloud-agnostic and open-ended – deploy on
any cloud or on-prem. It supports any ML
library or model, and if needed, you can even
remove it without breaking your running apps.
This “bring your own stack” philosophy derisks your investment.
Risk of being stuck with one ecosystem or having to re-engineer everything if you switch. For example, a purely AWS or single-LLM approach can stifle using new tools/models and force compromises.
Competitive DifferentiatorsEvaluation QuestionsKey Painpoints

Common Pitfalls to avoid

by using a cloud agnostic platform such as TrueFoundry over Portkey

  • Underestimating Total Cost: Solely relying on third-party LLM APIs can lead to ~30% higher cloud spend, and DIY model hosting often wastes resources. TrueFoundry’s optimizations prevent cost leakages from idle instances and high API markups.
  • Developer Productivity Loss: Rigid platforms or multiple disparate tools hurt dev experience (e.g., if you must follow a specific code style or spend time glueing systems). TrueFoundry imposes no code restrictions and provides a cohesive UX, boosting productivity and code portability.
  • Slow Scaling and Reactions: Manual or piecemeal autoscaling (or lack thereof) in DIY setups can be slow and error-prone. TrueFoundry’s built-in autoscaling and robust pipelines eliminate these latency issues, so your application can handle load spikes gracefully.
  • Limited Tool/Model Flexibility: Point solutions might not support every open-source model or library. TrueFoundry lets you integrate any model, library, or framework – ensuring you’re not boxed into a subset of tools.
  • Team Friction: When ML engineers use one tool and platform engineers another, it causes constant friction and handoffs. TrueFoundry’s self-serve nature fosters harmony – fewer back and-forths between DS and DevOps teams.
  • Long-Term Lock-In: Adopting a niche OSS tool might solve today’s problem but could lock you into its paradigm. TrueFoundry’s cloud-neutral design and use of standard infrastructure (Kubernetes) mean you maintain full control and optionality.

Real Outcomes at TrueFoundry

See the real results delivered by TrueFoundry against SageMaker

Deploys multi-region llm gateway deployment and has setup RBAC for model and MCP access through gateway

Controls model access and does chargeback to teams through cost accounting

Exploring and using for multiple use cases.

Route all AI inference calls across experimentation and production, processing over 1 billion tokens monthly across ~10 applications

Manage and route inference across multiple models, including self-hosted ones, handling requests with production-grade reliability.

FAQs/Common Objections

We’re already using Portkey’s open-source gateway for LLMs, and it works fine for us.
That’s great for the LLM API part – but consider the broader picture. TrueFoundry actually incorporates similar gateway capabilities and manages the surrounding infrastructure. You won’t need to build custom deployment pipelines or monitoring for your own models – it’s all provided out of the box. Plus, you continue to enjoy a unified API for external models while gaining enterprise reliability and support.
We prefer open-source tools to avoid vendor lock-in.
TrueFoundry is deployed in your cloud account and built on open standards (containers, Kubernetes). Your data never leaves your environment. While the platform itself isn’t open-source, it doesn’t lock in your models – if needed, you could remove TrueFoundry and your apps would still run on standard infrastructure. We embrace open APIs and integration with OSS tools, so you get flexibility without having to maintain everything yourself.
Our use case is mostly about routing to OpenAI/Anthropic – a full platform seems overkill.
TrueFoundry can operate in a lightweight mode for just inference routing if that’s all you need today. However, many teams find that needs evolve: tomorrow you may want to deploy a custom model (for cost, latency, or privacy reasons) or add streaming data pipelines. With TrueFoundry, you’re already prepared. It’s not overkill – it’s future-proofing. In the meantime, the overhead is minimal, and you gain extras like unified monitoring across all your LLM providers and any custom models.
We have a strong DevOps team; they can manage our ML infra with existing tools.
Certainly, a skilled team can stitch together solutions (K8s, Portkey, custom scripts,
etc.). But consider the opportunity cost: every hour spent on building and fixing
infrastructure is an hour not spent on delivering ML value. TrueFoundry accelerates
your DevOps efforts – it provides battle-tested automation (for scaling, logging, CI/CD)
so your engineers can focus on higher-level innovation. Even the best teams leverage
platforms to move faster and avoid re-inventing the wheel.
What about cost? Portkey is free (open-source) whereas TrueFoundry is a paid platform.
TrueFoundry’s value is in the savings and efficiency gains it delivers. In practice, our customers report substantial cost savings (e.g. 40%+ cloud cost reduction) that often outweigh the platform fees. Also, the time saved in engineering (deployment automation, troubleshooting) translates to saved $$$ in manpower. Portkey being free addresses only one slice of the problem – you might still incur higher cloud bills and dev costs. TrueFoundry optimizes the whole pipeline, typically leading to a lower total cost of ownership.
Is TrueFoundry as up-to-date and innovative as newer LLM tools like Portkey?
TrueFoundry is at the cutting edge of GenAI deployment. In fact, it offers an AI Gateway comparable to Portkey’s (supporting 250+ models, guardrails, etc.), plus a comprehensive platform around it. We actively integrate the latest open-source tech (and we even partner with communities like LangChain, HuggingFace). With frequent updates, we ensure you have the newest capabilities – from supporting the latest LLMs to advanced features like RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) and more.

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