Behest vs Portkey
They watch. We operate.
Portkey is an AI gateway — it routes, logs, and observes LLM traffic. Behest is the AI backend — it manages auth, memory, PII, rate limiting, token budgets, and more.
Portkey
Portkey is an AI gateway that sits between your app and LLM providers. It provides routing, fallback, caching, observability, and guardrails for LLM API calls.
Strong at: Multi-provider routing, observability dashboards, request logging, cost analytics, guardrails (PII, prompt injection), and fallback/retry logic.
Category: AI Gateway / Observability
Behest
Behest is the AI backend. One API call gives you auth, memory, PII scrubbing, prompt defense, rate limiting, token budgets, kill switches, and observability — self-hosted in your cloud.
Strong at: Complete AI backend with security, multi-tenant isolation, built-in business logic, and usage tier economics.
Category: AI Backend as a Service
The core difference
Portkey is a gateway you add to your existing backend — it routes, observes, and applies guardrails. Behest is the backend — handling auth, tenant isolation, conversation memory, and CORS natively so your frontend can call AI directly without building a server.
Feature Comparison
| Feature | Behest | Portkey |
|---|---|---|
| CORS Handling | ||
| Multi-tenant Auth & Isolation | ||
| Rate Limiting | 3-tier | Per-user/team |
| PII Scrubbing | Coming soon | Via guardrails |
| Prompt Injection Defense | Coming soon | Via guardrails |
| Conversation Memory | ||
| System Prompts | ||
| Token Budgets | Enterprise only | |
| Kill Switches | Coming soon | |
| Smart LLM Routing | ||
| Observability & Analytics | ||
| Multi-provider Support | ||
| Self-hosted Deployment | Enterprise | Enterprise |
| Usage Tiers & Token Economics | Coming soon |
Choose Portkey if you need...
- Deep observability dashboards for LLM traffic
- Multi-provider routing with fallback logic
- A lightweight proxy in front of your existing backend
Choose Behest if you need...
- CORS handling so your frontend calls AI directly — no backend needed
- Multi-tenant auth with tenant isolation built in
- Built-in conversation memory per user and session
- A complete AI backend, not a gateway you bolt onto existing infra
Need more than a gateway? Get the whole backend.
CORS, auth, memory, rate limiting, token budgets, and observability — one API call, no backend to build.