Guide
Nivana vs Portkey
Portkey is a gateway and control plane for teams running LLMs in production: you write the routing rules and it enforces them, with observability around every call. Nivana writes the routing for you, per request.
The short version
- Choose Portkey if you want a gateway with configurable fallbacks, load balancing and conditional routing, plus logs, traces, guardrails and prompt management across your own provider accounts.
- Choose Nivana if you want the router to decide which model answers each request, based on weekly evals per kind of task and live prices, without writing or maintaining routing rules.
How they differ
| Nivana | Portkey | |
|---|---|---|
| Who decides the model | The router, per request | Your configs: conditions, weights and fallbacks you define |
| What the decision is based on | Measured quality per task, live price and speed, request difficulty | Request metadata and rules you write |
| Observability | Each response carries its route and scores; usage and costs in the app | Full logs, traces, analytics and alerts |
| Provider accounts | None needed: one Nivana key | Your own provider keys |
| Data retention | Zero data retention requested on every call; API message content not stored | Configurable; logging is a core feature |
| Pricing | Pay as you go: the routed model’s live price plus a 50% fee | Plans by request volume and features, plus your provider costs |
Switching
Nivana speaks the OpenAI API, so switching is a base-URL change: point your OpenAI SDK at https://nivana.one/v1, keep the code, and the model string is accepted and ignored because Nivana routes. See migrating and the quickstart. You start with 2,000 free credits, enough to compare answers on your own prompts first.
What Portkey does better
Governance and visibility for a team running many prompts in production: detailed logs, budgets, guardrails and prompt versioning. If you already know which model each feature should use, a gateway enforces that well. Nivana is for the opposite case: you want the model chosen for you, and the choice to keep improving as new models arrive.
Or let the router pick, per request
Nivana sends every message to the model that scores best for it, sets how hard it thinks, and tells you which one answered. 2,000 free credits to start, no card.