Comparisons · 4 min read

AtlasBurn vs Portkey — AI gateway budgets or automatic runaway detection?

Portkey is an AI gateway with routing, fallbacks, content guardrails, and budget and rate limits on its Enterprise plan. AtlasBurn tracks cost per feature and automatically catches loops and budget breaches on every plan. Here's how they compare.

By Akhil Anand · November 8, 2026

Short answer: Portkey is a full AI gateway — one endpoint for many providers, with fallbacks, retries, load balancing, caching, content guardrails and observability. Its budget and rate limits are on the Enterprise plan and for select Pro customers. AtlasBurn is narrower: it tracks what each feature spends and automatically slows or stops loops and budget breaches, on every plan including Free. If you need routing, use a gateway; if you need a spend brake, AtlasBurn is built for that.

Last checked against Portkey's own pricing page and docs on 8 November 2026. Portkey's pricing page also says it is now part of Palo Alto Networks' Prisma AIRS AI Gateway, so details may change. Sources are linked at the end.

At a glance

AtlasBurn Portkey
Built for AI spend: per-feature cost, forecasting, guardrails AI gateway: routing, reliability, guardrails, observability
How it connects JS/TS SDK (patches fetch), or an edge proxy for any language Gateway base URL (api.portkey.ai/v1), SDKs and framework integrations; open-source gateway can run locally
Stores prompts and outputs Never — usage numbers only Logs are part of observability on all plans; PII anonymizer and retention settings on Enterprise
Budget limits Daily and hourly budgets, every plan USD or token budgets per provider integration or workspace; the key expires when hit — Enterprise and select Pro
Rate limits Request-rate burst detection Requests or tokens per minute, hour or day — Enterprise and select Pro
Loop detection Yes: identical requests and runaway context, per feature Not stated (its guardrails check content: regex, JSON schema, prompt injection and more)
What happens on a breach Throttle first for loops and bursts, block if it continues; budgets block at once Budget: key expires; rate limit: requests rejected until the window resets
Open source SDK is Apache-2.0; the service is hosted Gateway is open source (MIT) and self-hostable
Price Free during beta; plans from $0 (10M tokens/month) and $19 Developer free (10k logs/month); Production $49/month; Enterprise custom

Gateway vs guardrail

Portkey's strength is the gateway itself: switch providers, fall back when one is down, retry, balance load and cache — all behind one API. Its guardrails are mostly about content: checking outputs against patterns, schemas or prompt-injection rules.

AtlasBurn doesn't route traffic between providers. Its job is money: cost per feature, a bill forecast, and stopping spend that's going wrong.

Budgets: hard caps vs graded responses

Portkey's budget limits are hard caps: set a dollar or token limit on a provider integration, and when it's reached, the key expires. Limits can reset weekly or monthly, and can't be edited once set. They're available on Enterprise and to select Pro customers.

AtlasBurn treats different problems differently:

  • Budget breaches (daily or hourly) block at once on the Kill Switch tier — money is certain.
  • Loops and bursts are throttled first to one call every 2 seconds, then blocked only if they're still happening 60 seconds later or have cost more than your limit. This avoids cutting off a busy-but-healthy feature on a false alarm.
  • Only the looping feature is stopped; the rest of your app keeps running.
  • Alert and Throttle tiers never block, for teams that want to start cautiously.

Guardrails and the kill switch are on every AtlasBurn plan, including Free.

Privacy

Portkey lists logs and traces as part of its observability features, with a PII anonymizer and configurable retention on Enterprise. AtlasBurn never stores prompts or outputs — only model, tokens, cost, time and the feature label you choose.

Which should you choose?

  • Choose Portkey if you need a multi-provider gateway with fallbacks, load balancing, caching and content guardrails, or a self-hosted open-source gateway.
  • Choose AtlasBurn if you need per-feature cost and automatic protection from runaway loops and budget breaches on any plan, without storing prompts.
  • Use both: AtlasBurn's SDK auto-captures calls that go straight to a provider (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini and others), not calls sent through another gateway. If your traffic goes through Portkey, send usage to AtlasBurn's ingest API instead.

Sources

Try AtlasBurn free