Head-to-head

EvalGuard vs Portkey AI (acquired by Palo Alto Networks, 2026-04-30). 

LLM gateway acquired by Palo Alto Networks — being folded into Prisma AIRS as 'the AI gateway' (Q4 FY26 close)Portkey (portkey.ai) is an LLM gateway with observability, prompt management, and 21 partner-guardrail integrations. They raised $15M Series A in Feb 2026 and were acquired by Palo Alto Networks in Apr 2026 — going forward, Portkey deals are sold as part of PANW's Prisma AIRS bundle. Their open-source claim is gateway-frame only: caching persistence, semantic cache, circuit breaker, budget caps, OTel exporter, and PII model are scaffolded in the OSS code but only implemented in their closed control plane. We verified this by grep across all 33 Portkey-AI repos.

17
EvalGuard wins
·
6
Ties
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4
Portkey AI (acquired by Palo Alto Networks, 2026-04-30) wins

Competitor data (GitHub stars, downloads, feature counts, funding / acquisition status) verified as of 2026-04-28. EvalGuard's own counts are sourced live from the drift-checked registry.

Coverage at a glance

EvalGuard vs Portkey AI (acquired by Palo Alto Networks, 2026-04-30), by the numbers

Where both platforms publish a number, here's the gap. Our values come straight from the drift-checked registry; Portkey AI (acquired by Palo Alto Networks, 2026-04-30)'s are quoted as published.

Total Guardrails
EvalGuard0
Portkey AI (acquired by Palo Alto Networks, 2026-04-30)0
Red Team Plugins
EvalGuard0
Portkey AI (acquired by Palo Alto Networks, 2026-04-30)0
Eval Scorers
EvalGuard0
Portkey AI (acquired by Palo Alto Networks, 2026-04-30)0
Partner adapters
EvalGuard0
Portkey AI (acquired by Palo Alto Networks, 2026-04-30)0
FeatureEvalGuardPortkey AI (acquired by Palo Alto Networks, 2026-04-30)
Eval Scorers1880 (OpenAI passthrough)
Red Team Plugins2490
Attack Strategies420
Compliance Frameworks33 with code mappings0 (4 service certs)
Total Guardrails437 (188+249)~40 (20+21 partner)
Firewall p95 latency2.57ms (published)Not published
LLM Providers91 typed89 (1600+ aliased)
OSS ScopeApache 2.0 fullGateway frame only
Acquisition riskIndependentPANW (Apr 2026)
Cache keyField-awareSHA256(whole body)
Semantic cacheYesYes (Production tier)
Conditional routingYes (MongoDB-style)Yes (MongoDB-style)
Budget caps + auto-disableYesEnterprise only
Sticky load balancingYesYes (Feb 2026)
Circuit breakerYesOSS-scaffolded only
Canary testingYesNo
Quality-cost routingYesNo
Format translationYesYes
Partner adapters188 native, 0 partner21 partners
MCP supportYes (eval + server)Yes (gateway, Jan 2026)
Skills RegistryNoYes (Apr 2026)
Secret ReferencesNoYes (Mar 2026)
Native PII modelLocal (sovereign)Hosted (exfiltrates)
Terraform providerNoYes
SDK languages3 published (TS/Py/Go)2 (TS/Py)
Public benchmarksYes (/trust/latency)None
Pricing transparencyPublic tiersEnterprise quote-cliff

Why choose EvalGuard over Portkey AI (acquired by Palo Alto Networks, 2026-04-30)

  • No acquisition risk — Portkey now ships as Palo Alto Networks bundle (Q4 FY26 close). Customers concerned about vendor lock-in or product-direction shifts under PANW have an independent OSS alternative
  • 437 guardrails (188 scorers + 249 red-team plugins) vs Portkey's ~40 (20 deterministic + 21 partner) — 10× breadth on safety + offensive testing
  • Full-platform Apache 2.0 OSS — Portkey's persistent cache, circuit breaker, budget caps, OTel exporter, and PII model are scaffolded in OSS but only implemented in their closed control plane (verified by code audit grep)
  • 33 compliance framework code mappings (EU AI Act, NIST AI RMF, ISO 42001, MITRE ATLAS, OWASP LLM Top 10, +28) vs Portkey's 4 service certifications with no code controls
  • Field-aware cache keys (only role+content+model+tenantId) — Portkey's cache key SHA256s the entire body so top_p/user/stream changes force misses
  • Local PII model (Presidio + regex) keeps data sovereign — Portkey's PII plugin calls their hosted API, exfiltrating your inputs to Portkey's cloud
  • Quality-cost routing auto-downgrades simple queries to cheaper models — Portkey has no first-class cost-optimization router
  • 3 published SDKs (TS/Python/Go) from one monorepo vs Portkey's 2 (TS/Python); Java SDK is reserved on Maven Central but ships on customer request
  • Public reproducible benchmark methodology at /trust/latency (2.57ms p95 over 20K runs); first-of-its-kind NeMo Guardrails head-to-head — Portkey publishes no comparable measurements

Where Portkey AI (acquired by Palo Alto Networks, 2026-04-30) leads

  • 21 partner-guardrail integrations (Aporia, Pillar, Patronus, Bedrock Guardrails, Azure Content Safety, etc.) — customers with existing contracts can chain them through Portkey's gateway today; we ship 188 native scorers but no partner-webhook adapters yet
  • Skills Registry (managed Anthropic-format skills synced to Claude Code/Cursor/Codex/Copilot) is a net-new product category they shipped Apr 23 — we don't have a parallel
  • External secret manager references (AWS Secrets Manager, Azure Key Vault, HashiCorp Vault) — we ship Vault-backed BYOK encryption for our own secrets, but don't yet allow referencing customer-managed secrets by ARN/path
  • Terraform provider — Portkey ships terraform-provider-portkey for IaC; we have an OpenAPI spec but no published Terraform provider yet
  • Backed by Palo Alto Networks' enterprise sales motion + Prisma AIRS bundle — buyers in PANW shops have a sales-friction-reduction reason to choose Portkey
  • $15M Series A funding + 24,000+ org claim + named Fortune 500 customers — they have proof points an independent OSS competitor doesn't yet match

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