Portkey has an open-source gateway and a powerful cloud platform. Stockyard ships the full platform in one binary.
Portkey offers a clean split: the gateway (routing, fallbacks, retries) is open-source MIT. The observability, guardrails, and management features are cloud-only SaaS or enterprise deployment.
Stockyard ships everything in a single binary. The proxy, the dashboard, the observability, the audit trail, the guardrails. No cloud dependency for any feature.
| Feature | Stockyard | Portkey |
|---|---|---|
| Deployment | Single ~25MB Go binary | OSS gateway: Docker / Full platform: cloud SaaS |
| External deps | None (embedded SQLite) | Gateway: none / Platform: cloud-only |
| Open source | Proxy: Apache 2.0 / Platform: BSL 1.1 | Gateway: MIT (11.1k stars) / Platform: proprietary |
| Providers | 40+ | 200+ |
| Pricing | Free unlimited, paid from $0.99/mo per tool | Free 10k logs/mo, Production $49/mo |
| Cost tracking | ✓ Per-request | ✓ Per-request |
| Caching | ✓ Built-in | ✓ Semantic caching |
| Guardrails | ✓ 76 middleware modules | ✓ 50+ guardrails |
| Failover | ✓ Built-in | ✓ Built-in |
| Observability | ✓ Built-in (Lookout) | Cloud SaaS only |
| Prompt management | ✓ Tack Room | ✓ Cloud SaaS only |
| Audit trail | ✓ Hash-chained | Cloud logs |
| Red-team testing | ✓ Feral | None |
| Self-hosted observability | ✓ Everything self-hosted | Enterprise plan only |
Data reflects publicly available documentation as of March 2026.
Everything runs locally. With Portkey, the gateway routes requests, but observability, guardrails, and management require their cloud. Stockyard ships all of these in the same binary.
Cheaper entry. Stockyard's free tier has no request limit and no log retention limit. Portkey's free tier caps at 10k logs/month with 3-day retention. The individual tools from $0.99/mo vs Portkey's $49/mo.
Data residency. Every feature in Stockyard runs on your infrastructure. With Portkey, your request metadata flows to their cloud for observability. For regulated industries, that can be a compliance problem.
If you want managed infrastructure with zero ops, Portkey's cloud is excellent. Their team handles uptime, scaling, and compliance certs (SOC2, HIPAA on enterprise). If you do not want to manage any servers, Portkey is a strong choice.
200+ providers is significantly more than Stockyard's 40+. If you use niche or regional providers, Portkey likely supports them.
Portkey's semantic caching and 50+ guardrails are mature features. Stockyard has caching and guardrails, but Portkey's are more extensive.
Portkey is a polished cloud product with excellent guardrails and broad provider support. Stockyard is the right choice if you need the full platform self-hosted in one binary without cloud dependencies.