FreeModel vs Portkey

The short answer

Side by side

Portkey's published model coverage figures differ between their own pages, so this table states none. Check their docs directly if the count matters to you.

Where Portkey is the better choice

This is not a close call in several of these cases. If any of them apply, Portkey is the right pick and we are not.

1. You need governance, full stop

Budgets per team, RBAC, SSO with Okta, SCIM provisioning, audit logs, retention policies, FinOps dashboards. FreeModel has none of this and does not pretend to. If you are accountable for how a department spends on models, you need a layer that can answer "who spent what, and who approved it" — we cannot.

2. Compliance certifications are a hard requirement

SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, HIPAA, BAA signing. If your procurement process requires these, the evaluation ends here. We publish nothing of the sort.

3. You need the data plane inside your own VPC

Portkey's hybrid deployment runs the gateway and data plane in your environment while they manage the control plane, so sensitive prompts never leave. FreeModel is hosted only. There is no configuration that changes this.

4. You want guardrails and observability built in

20+ guardrail checks, OpenTelemetry, 21+ metric dashboards. If you are running production traffic against models and need to see and constrain it, that toolkit exists in Portkey and does not in ours.

5. You already have provider accounts

If you are already paying OpenAI, Anthropic and Google directly, Portkey adds control without changing who you buy from. Switching to us would mean giving up direct billing for no governance gain.

Where FreeModel is the better choice

1. You do not have provider keys yet

This is the main one. Portkey is BYOK only: before it does anything for you, you need an account and a payment method at every provider you want to reach. FreeModel works without any of that.

2. Free capacity is the point, not governance

If what you actually need is "run this without paying yet", a governance layer does not help; it governs keys you do not have. FreeModel routes to free capacity first and falls through when it is gone.

3. You are one person, not a procurement process

Portkey's own positioning targets teams with compliance requirements. For a solo developer or a small project, the governance surface is overhead you will configure once and never look at again.

4. You want the agent layer, not the gateway layer

FreeModel sits under Aiglade, which ships four agent clients preset with task dispatch and an approval step. If you are orchestrating agents rather than governing API spend, that is the product you want.

Switching in either direction

From Portkey to FreeModel

base_url    https://freemodel.online/v1              (OpenAI format)
            https://freemodel.online/api/gateway     (Anthropic format)

You can stop supplying provider keys. That is the change.
Budget configs, guardrails and audit hooks have no equivalent here;
if you relied on them, migrate those decisions into your own code first.

From FreeModel to Portkey

1  Get provider keys (BYOK only, one per provider you use)
2  Add them in Portkey's dashboard or config
3  Point your client at Portkey's gateway URL
4  Recreate any budget or routing policy you had here as Portkey config

Note the billing change: after this, you pay providers directly.

What the supply side actually contains

The whole comparison rests on one question: who supplies the model access. Portkey supplies none; it routes to keys you add, so its coverage is whatever your provider accounts can reach. FreeModel supplies the list, and the list has a shape worth stating before you compare it against anything.

The public endpoint carries 199 ids. Of those, 77% are chat models, 9% generate images, and 23% cover everything else: video, speech synthesis, speech recognition, embeddings and rerank[1]. Six of the entries are routes rather than single models, and each carries a candidates count - how many models sit behind the name, in the order they are tried. That is the number that matters for an agent workload: depth behind a name, not depth across the list.

None of that is governance. It is inventory, and it is the half of the problem Portkey assumes you have already solved by opening accounts and payment methods at every provider you intend to use.

Deciding in three questions

The two products are not adjacent, so the evaluation is short. Ask these in order and stop at the first one that applies.

1. Step 1: do you have provider accounts? If not, Portkey does nothing for you today: it is BYOK only, so every capability it has waits on a key and a payment method at a provider. FreeModel is the side that works before that step.
2. Step 2: is compliance in your procurement path? SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, HIPAA, BAA signing. If a reviewer requires any of these, the comparison ends here and Portkey is the answer. We publish nothing of the sort.
3. Step 3: does the data plane have to stay inside your network? Portkey runs the gateway and data plane in your VPC in its hybrid deployment, with the control plane managed. FreeModel is hosted only, at every configuration.

Three noes and the answer is FreeModel; any yes and it is Portkey. There is no version of this where you need both for the same traffic, which is the useful thing to know before spending a week on a proof of concept.

FreeModel vs Portkey FAQ