What Portkey Is
Portkey is a full-featured AI gateway and observability platform. It sits in front of your LLM calls and provides routing, caching, guardrails, rate limiting, and cost tracking across more than 50 LLM providers: OpenAI, Anthropic, Azure, Bedrock, Cohere, and dozens more. Teams that use multiple models, or want to swap providers without changing application code, get real value from it.
Portkey’s strongest features are provider flexibility and developer experience: a short integration, semantic caching that reduces duplicate LLM calls, and a prompt management studio where non-engineers can update prompts without code deploys.
What Sentrely Is
Sentrely is a managed AI team, backed by real engineers, that builds, ships and monitors production-grade software in accounts you own. Our AI employees build, ship and monitor your production-grade software, and our engineers deploy and supervise them. Your team asks for work through an agent in your Slack.
Every change runs through automated safety checks, important changes need human sign-off, and you get a 35-day rewind on data and files. You have a named account manager and on-call support.
What’s Different
Portkey is infrastructure for people who build AI applications. You still need developers to write the app, wire in the gateway, and run it.
Sentrely is for people who need the application itself and don’t have, or don’t want to hire, a development team. We do the building and running; you approve what matters.
| Dimension | Portkey | Sentrely |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | AI gateway and observability platform | Managed AI dev team |
| Who uses it | Developers and platform teams | Founders and business owners |
| LLM provider support | 50+ providers | Chosen by our engineers per project |
| Semantic caching | Yes | Not a product feature |
| Prompt management studio | Yes | Not a product feature |
| Who writes the software | Your developers | Our AI employees, supervised by our engineers |
| Support | Tiered by plan | Named account manager, on-call support |
| Pricing | Free tier + usage-based plans | Custom, scoped on a free call |
When Portkey Is the Right Choice
- Your team builds LLM applications and wants one gateway for many providers
- You want to swap providers without changing application code
- Semantic caching matters for your use case (high-volume repetitive queries)
- A prompt management studio for non-technical stakeholders is a priority
When Sentrely Is the Right Choice
- You need business software built and running, and you’re not a developer
- You tried a vibe-coding app and things broke with nobody to call
- You want the finished software in hosting and code accounts you own
- You want real engineers watching over the AI doing the work
The Underlying Question
Are you building AI software yourself and need better plumbing, or do you need the software built? If it’s the first, look at Portkey. If it’s the second, book a free 30-minute call and we’ll scope it with you.