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.
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.
| Feature | EvalGuard | Portkey AI (acquired by Palo Alto Networks, 2026-04-30) |
|---|---|---|
| Eval Scorers | 198 | 0 (OpenAI passthrough) |
| Red Team Plugins | 249 | 0 |
| Attack Strategies | 43 | 0 |
| Compliance Frameworks | 33 with code mappings | 0 (4 service certs) |
| Total Guardrails | 447 (198+249) | ~40 (20+21 partner) |
| Firewall p95 latency | 2.57ms (published) | Not published |
| LLM Providers | 91 typed | 89 (1600+ aliased) |
| OSS Scope | Apache 2.0 full | Gateway frame only |
| Acquisition risk | Independent | PANW (Apr 2026) |
| Cache key | Field-aware | SHA256(whole body) |
| Semantic cache | Yes | Yes (Production tier) |
| Conditional routing | Yes (MongoDB-style) | Yes (MongoDB-style) |
| Budget caps + auto-disable | Yes | Enterprise only |
| Sticky load balancing | Yes | Yes (Feb 2026) |
| Circuit breaker | Yes | OSS-scaffolded only |
| Canary testing | Yes | No |
| Quality-cost routing | Yes | No |
| Format translation | Yes | Yes |
| Partner adapters | 198 native, 0 partner | 21 partners |
| MCP support | Yes (eval + server) | Yes (gateway, Jan 2026) |
| Skills Registry | No | Yes (Apr 2026) |
| Secret References | No | Yes (Mar 2026) |
| Native PII model | Local (sovereign) | Hosted (exfiltrates) |
| Terraform provider | No | Yes |
| SDK languages | 3 published (TS/Py/Go) | 2 (TS/Py) |
| Public benchmarks | Yes (/trust/latency) | None |
| Pricing transparency | Public tiers | Enterprise 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
- 447 guardrails (198 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 198 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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