OpenProxyAI vs. Portkey: SaaS-first vs. self-hosted-first
Portkey is the most feature-comparable product to OpenProxyAI in this space — a unified gateway, real guardrails (including PII redaction), observability, and enterprise governance. If you put the feature lists side by side, they overlap a lot. The difference that actually matters is architectural, not a checklist item: which deployment model is the default, and which one you have to pay to unlock.
Portkey's model
Portkey is SaaS-first. The default way to run it is as a managed, multi-tenant service — your traffic goes through infrastructure Portkey operates. VPC hosting and fully air-gapped deployment exist, but as part of the Enterprise tier, not the starting point. For a lot of teams that's a perfectly reasonable trade: less infrastructure to run, a managed service handling scaling and uptime.
OpenProxyAI's model
OpenProxyAI is self-hosted from the first tier up. It runs inside your VPC against your own Postgres and Redis from day one — there's no multi-tenant data plane to opt out of later, because it was never the default to begin with.
Why the ordering is the actual decision
Both products can, in the end, run inside your infrastructure. But "self-hosted is available at the top tier" and "self-hosted is what you start with" are different conversations with your security team. The first one asks them to evaluate a SaaS vendor's data handling practices unless you pay for the option to avoid it. The second one means there's no SaaS data-handling question to evaluate in the first place — the software runs where you tell it to, from the free trial onward.
If your organization is comfortable with a managed multi-tenant service and wants the fastest path to a working gateway, Portkey's SaaS-first model is a legitimate, well-built option — the model catalog and guardrail feature set are genuinely strong. If "our prompts never touch infrastructure we don't control" is a requirement rather than a nice-to-have, that's the gap OpenProxyAI is built to close by default.
See Deploying with Docker Compose for what running it in your own VPC actually looks like.