Honest comparison
Mysty PAI vs Portkey
Portkey governs API requests from the cloud. PAI governs the workers themselves — on your hardware, every action approved and signed.
Honest comparison
Side by side
Honest comparison, checked 28 September 2026. Portkey is an excellent AI gateway — now part of Palo Alto Networks, where it serves as the AI gateway for Prisma AIRS. If you need cloud API middleware for a dev team, it's a fine choice. PAI solves a different problem: governing autonomous Pies on Physical infrastructure you own.
| Feature | PAI | Portkey |
|---|---|---|
| Where it runs | Your Mac, your office, our cloud pod or your VPC | Portkey's cloud; Enterprise adds a hybrid option with the data plane in your VPC; the open-source gateway can be self-hosted |
| What it governs | Agents: actions, tools, spending, autonomy | AI traffic through a gateway: LLM requests and MCP tool access — routing, keys, guardrails, access control |
| Human-in-the-loop approvals | ✅ Telegram buttons, TTL'd, action-bound · WhatsApp buttons Coming soon | MCP Gateway lists approval workflows per server; per-action approvals from your phone are not documented |
| Autonomy levels (L0–L3) with platform floors | ✅ payments/deletes always need approval | Not a documented feature |
| Audit trail | Ed25519-signed, hash-chained, offline-verifiable | Request and MCP tool-call logs; org-wide audit logs on Enterprise |
| Semantic caching | ✅ on-device (pgvector), all tiers | Production plan and up (the free Developer plan has simple caching) |
| Log retention | Your disk — you set the retention | Logs: 3 days (Developer), 30 days (Production), custom (Enterprise) |
| Memory of your history | ✅ imports your ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini exports, per-company isolation | Not in scope — Portkey is a gateway |
| Gateway features (routing, fallbacks, budgets, guardrails) | ✅ via embedded gateway + policy engine | ✅ mature — 1,600+ LLMs; granular budgets and rate limits on Enterprise |
| Open source | Agent SDK + audit chain licensed Apache-2.0 — public release planned, not yet published | Gateway (MIT, on GitHub) |
Sources. Every Portkey fact on this page was checked on 28 Sep 2026 against the official pages below. Products change; if something here is out of date, tell us and we'll correct it.
- Palo Alto Networks — Completes Acquisition of Portkey to Secure AI Agents (press release, 2026)
- Portkey — Pricing (plans, log retention, caching, audit logs, budgets)
- Portkey — Home (1,600+ LLMs)
- Portkey Docs — MCP Gateway
- Portkey Docs — Hybrid (private cloud) deployment
- Portkey-AI/gateway on GitHub (MIT licence)
Keep comparing
Same test, other tools
Every comparison is honest — including when the other tool is the right answer for the job.