Portkey Alternatives? Portkey vs Helicone

Cole Gottdank· September 2, 2024

LLM applications in production demand strong observability tools. Without them, you're flying blind on costs, performance, and usage patterns.

Both Helicone and Portkey offer solutions to this problem, but with different approaches and strengths. Let's dive in and help you determine which platform is the best fit for your needs.

How is Helicone different?

1. Helicone offers dual logging methods

Helicone provides flexibility through both proxy-based and async logging. While Portkey only supports proxy-based logging, Helicone lets you choose the approach that fits your architecture:

• Proxy integration: Place Helicone between your client and LLM provider for simple one-line integration
• Async logging: Use Helicone's SDK for background logging without affecting request flow

This dual approach makes Helicone adaptable to different deployment scenarios.

2. Helicone prioritizes optimization metrics

Helicone's dashboard focuses on optimization-relevant metrics like evaluation scores, costs, completion tokens, top models, and user metrics.

Helicone's detailed metrics help teams understand LLM usage from a practical perspective, making it easier to optimize spending and track ROI.

Quick Comparison: Helicone vs Portkey

Platform

LLM Evaluation

LLM Monitoring

Security, Compliance, Privacy

Helicone: The Complete LLM Observability

The ability to test prompt variations on production traffic without touching a line of code is magical. It feels like we're cheating; it's just that good!

— Nishant Shukla, Sr. Director of AI at QA Wolf

Helicone is an open-source observability platform built for teams optimizing their production LLM applications. It provides real-time analytics, cost-tracking, and performance insights that empowers developers and product teams to make data-driven decisions throughout the entire LLM lifecycle.

Key Strengths

• Multiple logging methods (proxy or async)
• Experiment with prompts on production traffic without code changes
• Highly scalable, built to handle trillions of LLM interactions effortlessly with Kafka
• Built-in evaluation for human and automated evaluations

Why Developers Choose Helicone

• 1-line integration and ability to start logging within minutes
• Focuses on data collection and cost optimization (with features like caching)
• Usable by both technical and non-technical team members

How to integrate with Helicone

Example of Proxy integration (1-line setup):

import OpenAI from "openai";

const openai = new OpenAI({
  apiKey: process.env.OPENAI_API_KEY,
  baseURL: "https://oai.helicone.ai/v1",
  defaultHeaders: {
    "Helicone-Auth": `Bearer ${process.env.HELICONE_API_KEY}`,
  },
});

Portkey: Gateway-Focused Observability

With 30 million policies a month, managing over 25 GenAI use cases became a pain. Portkey helped with prompt management, tracking costs per use case, and ensuring our keys were used correctly.

— Portkey user

Portkey is an LLM observability solution with strong Gateway capabilities—allowing you to integrate multiple providers via a single endpoint. It functions strictly as a proxy, however, but is also suitable cross-functional teams.

Key Strengths

• Advanced AI Gateway: Connect to multiple AI models through a single API with load balancing and routing
• AI Guardrails: Extensive options for securing and controlling LLM behavior in real-time
• Robust prompt management: Modular approach to prompt management and reuse with Prompt Partials
• Virtual Keys: Tools for secure API key management in large teams

Why Developers Choose Portkey

• Universal API: Single consistent interface for 250+ AI models
• Highly customizable LLM behavior: Comprehensive guardrails system for controlling LLM outputs
• Advanced prompt engineering: Modular prompt architecture with reusable components

How to Integrate with Portkey

import Portkey from 'portkey-ai';

const portkey = new Portkey({
  apiKey: "YOUR_PORTKEY_API_KEY",
  virtualKey: "YOUR_VIRTUAL_KEY"
});

async function createChatCompletion() {
  const chat_complete = await portkey.chat.completions.create({
    model: "gpt-3.5-turbo",
    messages: [
      { role: "system", content: "You are a helpful assistant." },
      { role: "user", content: "Hello!" }
    ]
  });
  console.log(chat_complete.choices[0].message.content);
}

createChatCompletion();

How Helicone and Portkey Compare

Which platform should you choose?

Both Helicone and Portkey offer robust observability solutions for LLM applications, but they excel in different areas:

Choose Helicone if you:

• Need simple integration options with either proxy or async logging
• Want highly detailed insights like cost tracking, user analytics, latency, and more
• Designed for the entire LLM lifecycle from development to production, with intuitive UI tools for experimentation, monitoring, and optimization
• Have cross-functional teams that needs collaboration outside of the codebase
• Value out-of-the-box security and simple third-party app integrations

Choose Portkey if you:

• Need advanced gateway capabilities with more mature load balancing and fallback systems
• Want more control over LLM behavior with comprehensive guardrails system
• Need modular prompt components with their prompt partials feature

The right choice ultimately depends on your specific use case, team composition, and priorities. Both platforms offer free tiers. We recommend you test them in your environment before committing to either solution.

You might also like:

• Helicone vs Comet: Best Open-Source LLM Evaluation Platform

• Langfuse Alternatives? Langfuse vs Helicone

• A Deep Dive Into Helicone Features