AI gateways
Bonito vs Portkey (Prisma AIRS AI Gateway)
Security-owned AI gateway vs. gateway plus managed agents
Acquired by Palo Alto Networks (May 2026); now Prisma AIRS AI Gateway
Portkey is an AI gateway with an MCP gateway, guardrails, observability and prompt management, open-sourced in March 2026 and since May 2026 part of Palo Alto Networks' Prisma AIRS. It sits in front of agents built elsewhere. Bonito covers the gateway and also builds, runs and governs the agents, with knowledge bases, approvals and schedules.
Portkey pricing
Developer free (10K logs/mo); Production $49/mo (100K logs, then $9 per 100K); Enterprise custom, now sold through Palo Alto Networks.
Model costs
Priced per log, not per token; you connect your own provider keys.
What Portkey does well
- Very broad model coverage (1,600+ models) behind one API, with fallbacks, load balancing and retries
- Budget and rate limits on keys, RBAC and org-wide audit logs
- A mature MCP gateway with OAuth 2.1, a registry, RBAC and traces of every tool call
- Guardrail integrations with Bedrock Guardrails, Azure Content Safety and Zscaler
- Gateway fully open source since March 2026, with semantic caching on Enterprise
Where Bonito goes further
- Builds and runs agents: visual canvas, chat builder, approval queue, schedules and persistent memory
- Dollar budgets per agent, not only per key
- Managed knowledge bases with a BYO bucket, injected into gateway and agent calls
- Data residency pinning to CA, US or EU that also constrains failover
- One bonito.yaml for agents, gateway, knowledge bases and policies, deployed with the CLI
- An independent vendor rather than a component of a security suite
Where Portkey is ahead of Bonito
- Open-source, self-hostable gateway
- Semantic caching; Bonito has none
- Security ecosystem and guardrail integrations through Palo Alto Networks
- Model catalog breadth
Capability by capability
| Capability | Bonito | Portkey |
|---|---|---|
| Agents | ||
| Build and run agents | Yes | Nogoverns agent traffic; does not build or host agents |
| Approval queue and scheduled runs | Yes | Nonot found in their docs (Sep 2026) |
| Dollar budgets per agent | Yes | Partialbudgets on keys, not agents |
| MCP support | Yes | Yes |
| Routing | ||
| OpenAI-compatible gateway | Yes | Yes |
| Automatic failover across providers | Yes | Yes |
| Cheaper models for simple work (cost routing) | Yes | Nonot found in their docs (Sep 2026) |
| Bedrock, Vertex, Azure and direct providers in one place | Yes | Yes |
| Semantic caching | No | YesEnterprise |
| Governance | ||
| SSO, RBAC and audit log | Yes | Yes |
| Data residency pinning | Yes | PartialVPC or private cloud on Enterprise |
| Observability and knowledge | ||
| Agent traces with cost per request and agent | Yes | Yescost attributed by metadata |
| Knowledge bases (RAG) | Yes | Nonot found in their docs (Sep 2026) |
| How you run it | ||
| Whole stack from one config file | Yes | YesTerraform provider and CLI |
| Self-hosted or open source | Partial | Yes |
| No markup on inference | Yes | Yes |
Checked against Portkey's own documentation on 2026-09-27. Products change quickly; if something here is out of date, tell us at hello@trybonito.com and we will fix it.
Sources
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