Curate-Me vs Portkey vs Helicone: AI Gateway Comparison

Published February 27, 2026

If you are evaluating AI gateway and governance tools for your production agents, you have probably come across Portkey, Helicone, and now Curate-Me. All three sit between your application and LLM providers. They solve different problems, and the right choice depends on what you are building.

This is an honest comparison. We will tell you where competitors are stronger, where we are stronger, and when you should use each one.

Quick Comparison

When to Use Portkey

Portkey is the right choice if:

• You need 200+ provider integrations. Portkey supports every major and minor LLM provider. We support 17+. If you are routing across dozens of niche providers beyond what we cover, Portkey has the integration breadth.
• Caching is critical. Portkey offers semantic and exact-match caching that reduces latency and cost on repeated queries. We do not have caching yet.
• You want OSS self-hosting. Portkey’s gateway is open source with 6K GitHub stars. You can self-host and customize. Our platform is currently closed-source.
• Prompt management matters. If your team needs prompt versioning, A/B testing, and experiment tracking, Portkey has this built in.

Portkey is an excellent LLM proxy for teams that primarily need reliability (retries, fallbacks, load balancing) and observability (logs, traces, cost tracking) across many providers.

Where Portkey falls short: Portkey proxies LLM API calls but cannot run agents. If your agents need sandboxed execution environments, network controls, or compute governance, Portkey cannot help. There is no human-in-the-loop approval system and no immutable audit trail for regulatory compliance.

When to Use Helicone

Helicone is the right choice if:

• You primarily need observability. Helicone started as an LLM logging and tracing platform and does it well. Request-level analytics, per-user cost tracking, and session visualization are mature features.
• Budget is tight. Helicone’s free tier includes 100K requests per month — the most generous free tier in the category. Their Pro plan at $25/month is the lowest entry point.
• You want lightweight integration. A single header change (Helicone-Auth: Bearer sk-xxx) and you are logging. Minimal setup friction.

Helicone is strong at showing you what your LLM usage looks like — where money is going, which prompts are expensive, how usage trends over time.

Where Helicone falls short: Helicone’s governance features are limited. Rate limiting is basic, there is no PII scanning, no model allowlists, no HITL approvals, and no managed execution. The platform is optimized for visibility, not policy enforcement.

When to Use Curate-Me

Curate-Me is the right choice if:

• You are running AI agents (not just LLM calls). Agents that execute code, browse the web, and make autonomous decisions need more than an API proxy. They need governance over the execution layer — sandboxed containers, network policies, compute quotas.
• You need policy enforcement, not just logging. Our 5-step governance chain actively blocks requests that violate policies. Rate limits, cost caps, PII scanning, model allowlists, and HITL approvals all enforce in real-time. Requests that fail any check are rejected before reaching the LLM provider.
• Compliance matters. The EU AI Act requires audit trails, human oversight, and risk management for AI systems. Our immutable audit log and HITL approval system map directly to these requirements.
• You want one platform, not five. Instead of stitching together Portkey (proxy) + E2B (execution) + Langfuse (tracing) + custom scripts (governance), Curate-Me combines gateway, runners, observability, and governance in a single platform.

Where we are weaker today:

• 17+ provider integrations vs Portkey’s 200+
• No caching layer
• No prompt management
• No open-source version yet
• Zero public user base (we launched today)

We are honest about this. If you need broad provider support or mature caching, we are not there yet.

Architecture Differences

Portkey Architecture

App → Portkey Gateway → LLM Provider
          ↓
    Logs, Traces, Cache
    Retries, Fallbacks

Portkey is a smart proxy with reliability features. Great at routing, retrying, and logging. Does not touch the execution layer.

Helicone Architecture

App → Helicone Proxy → LLM Provider
          ↓
    Logs, Analytics, Cost Tracking

Helicone is primarily an observability layer. It records everything for analysis but does not actively enforce policies.

Curate-Me Architecture

App → Curate-Me Gateway → Governance Chain → LLM Provider
          ↓                    ↓
     Cost Recording      Rate Limit → Cost Check → PII Scan
     Audit Trail         → Model Allowlist → HITL Gate
          ↓
     Managed Runners (sandboxed execution)

Curate-Me is an enforcement layer. Every request passes through the governance chain. Managed runners extend governance to the execution layer.

The Decision Framework

Try It

All three tools offer free tiers. The best way to decide is to try them with your actual use case.

• Curate-Me: dashboard.curate-me.ai/signup  — 10K free requests/month, full governance chain
• Portkey: portkey.ai  — free OSS gateway, unlimited self-hosted
• Helicone: helicone.ai  — 100K free requests/month

If you are running autonomous AI agents that need cost control, security scanning, and an audit trail, start with Curate-Me . Integration takes 2 minutes — change your base URL and you are governed.

Curate-Me is the governance layer for AI agents. Cost caps, PII scanning, rate limiting, HITL approvals, managed runners, and a full audit trail — zero code changes.