A sovereign alternative to Portkey
If you’re evaluating a Portkey alternative, the question is usually one of these three.
Teams come to us looking for a Portkey alternative for concrete reasons, not because Portkey is a bad product, but because their requirements moved. The most common drivers since Portkey’s 2026 acquisition by Palo Alto Networks and the freeze of its open-source gateway:
- Data residency that’s provable per request. A region of deployment isn’t an answer to "where did this request’s data go?" Routeplane classifies regulated data on every call and hard-locks it to an in-region provider.
- Governance in your own data plane. PII/secret redaction and injection detection on the hot path, in Rust, not gated behind a hosted tier.
- Cost in the currency you report in. Chargeback by team and project in USD and ₹, not just token dashboards.
Feature-by-feature
| Capability | routeplane | Portkey |
|---|---|---|
| Per-request regulated-data classification | ✓ | ✗ |
| Region-locked routing per request | ✓ | ✗ |
| PII / secret redaction in the data plane | ✓ | ◐ hosted Pro+ |
| Multi-currency FinOps (USD + ₹) | ✓ | ✗ |
| No-GC Rust data plane | ✓ | ✗ TS/Node |
| Self-hostable gateway | ✓ | ◐ OSS frozen |
Which should you choose?
Choose routeplane when
- Residency must be enforced and proven per request, across clouds.
- You want guardrails on your own hot path, not as a hosted dependency.
- Finance needs multi-currency chargeback by team and project.
Choose Portkey when
- You need the largest provider catalog and a long commercial track record today.
- You have no hard residency mandate and are happy with hosted governance.
Migrating to routeplane
Switching is a base-URL change, point your OpenAI-compatible clients at https://api.routeplane.ai/v1. Your SDKs are unchanged; sovereignty and cost attribution arrive as response headers.
Frequently asked questions
What is the best Portkey alternative for regulated teams?
For teams under DPDP, GDPR, or HIPAA mandates, the deciding capability is per-request residency enforcement and in-data-plane guardrails. Routeplane is built specifically for that, with a neutral, self-hostable Rust data plane.
Is Routeplane cheaper than Portkey?
Routeplane is in private beta. Its small footprint and scale-to-zero deployment are designed to keep the cost floor low, and self-hosting avoids per-seat hosted-tier pricing. Compare on your own volume before deciding.
See the residency header come back true.
Point your existing OpenAI-compatible client at routeplane and route your first sovereign request this week.