Amazon S3 vs Portkey (2026): Pricing, Features & Verdict
Amazon S3 is our pick, scoring 7.8/10 against 7.6/10 for Portkey on our Hosting & Infrastructure criteria. Its biggest advantage: higher Scalability score (10/10 vs 8/10). Only Portkey has a free plan.
Last updated: November 2026
A
Amazon S3
7.8/10
Amazon S3 is AWS's pay-as-you-go object storage service. Businesses use it to store files, backups, data lakes and static website assets at almost any scale.
Portkey
7.6/10
Portkey is an AI gateway and LLMOps control plane that routes, monitors, and governs requests to 1,600+ LLMs for engineering teams and enterprises.
Feature-by-Feature Comparison
| Feature | A Amazon S3 | |
|---|---|---|
| Scores | ||
| Overall Rating | 7.8/10 | 7.6/10 |
| Integration | 10/10 | 9/10 |
| Support | 6/10 | 6/10 |
| Cost | 5/10 | 7/10 |
| Customization | 8/10 | 7/10 |
| Security | 9/10 | 8/10 |
| Reliability | 9/10 | 8/10 |
| Ease of Use | 5/10 | 8/10 |
| Analytics | 8/10 | 9/10 |
| Scalability | 10/10 | 8/10 |
| Pricing | ||
| Free plan | No | Yes |
| Cheapest paid plan | Contact for pricing | $49/mo Production |
| Estimated cost for 10 users | Contact for pricing | Free Open Source |
| Features | ||
| Object Storage | ||
| API and CLI | ||
| Uptime SLA | ||
| Automatic Backups | Not listed | |
| Dedicated Servers | Not listed | |
| Managed WordPress | ||
| Multiple Regions | Not listed | |
| Shared Hosting | ||
| VPS Hosting | Not listed | |
Amazon S3 vs Portkey cost by team size
| Team size | Amazon S3 | Portkey |
|---|---|---|
| 1 user | Contact for pricing | FreeOpen Source |
| 5 users | Contact for pricing | FreeOpen Source |
| 10 users | Contact for pricing | FreeOpen Source |
| 25 users | Contact for pricing | FreeOpen Source |
| 50 users | Contact for pricing | FreeOpen Source |
The plan that fits each team size, billed monthly, before add-ons and usage charges. Each cost opens that tool's pricing calculator for the team size.
Who Amazon S3 and Portkey suit
| Audience | Amazon S3 | Portkey |
|---|---|---|
| Enterprise | 9/10It offers Object Lock, replication, audit logging and organisation-wide analytics through Storage Lens. | 8/10The Enterprise plan adds SSO, RBAC, VPC deployment, and HIPAA/SOC 2 support, and the product is now part of Palo Alto Networks' Prisma AIRS. |
| Developers | 9/10S3 is managed through a widely adopted API and SDKs, and that API has become the standard interface for object storage. | 9/10Setup takes a few lines of code with OpenAI-compatible SDKs, and there is a free tier and an open-source gateway. |
| SaaS Companies | 8/10It scales without limit for application data, and transfers to other AWS services in the same Region are free. | 8/10Built for teams running production GenAI features across multiple LLM providers. |
| Startups | 7/10There are no upfront costs, and new AWS accounts get Free Tier credits. | 7/10A free tier and a $49 Production plan keep the entry cost low. |
| Small Business | 5/10The storage rates are cheap, but reviewers say the console and the pricing model are complex. | Not rated |
Which One Should You Choose?
AWhy choose Amazon S3
- Higher Scalability score (10/10 vs 8/10)
- Higher Integration score (10/10 vs 9/10)
- Includes Object Storage, which Portkey lacks
Why choose Portkey
- Has a free plan (Amazon S3 does not)
- Higher Ease of Use score (8/10 vs 5/10)
- Higher Cost score (7/10 vs 5/10)
Pros & Cons
AAmazon S3
Pros
- Very high scale: about 500 trillion objects stored and around 200 million requests per second, according to Wikipedia.
- The S3 API is the industry standard, so a wide range of tools and competing storage providers support it.
- Strong data protection: versioning, MFA Delete, Object Lock in compliance mode, and cross-Region replication with a time-bound SLA.
- Many storage classes, from Express One Zone to Glacier Deep Archive at about $0.001 per GB-month, let teams match cost to how often data is accessed.
- Reviews are consistently positive: about 4.7 out of 5 from more than 1,100 Capterra reviews.
Cons
- Internet egress costs about $0.09 per GB after the first free 100 GB a month, and competitors widely criticise these fees.
- Request, retrieval and lifecycle-transition fees make monthly bills hard to predict.
- Reviewers on Capterra and TrustRadius call the console navigation and user interface complex.
- The SLA pays only service credits toward future bills, never refunds, and infrequent-access classes have a lower 99% uptime threshold.
Portkey
Pros
- Unified API covering more than 1,600 models, with automatic fallbacks, retries, and load balancing.
- Detailed logs and traces show the latency, cost, and retry path of each request.
- An open-source core and a free tier let developers try it before paying.
- Enterprise governance features include budgets, rate limits, RBAC, SSO, and audit logs, with VPC deployment available.
Cons
- Since the 2026 acquisition, paid plans route through Palo Alto Networks' Prisma AIRS, which brings uncertainty about future pricing and roadmap.
- You pay for the gateway on top of LLM provider costs, and provider billing stays separate.
- Below Enterprise, support is community-only, and the free plan keeps logs for just 3 days.
- It may be more platform than needed for small prototypes that want only a simple proxy.
Not sold on either?
Frequently Asked Questions
Amazon S3 scores higher on our Hosting & Infrastructure criteria: 7.8/10 against 7.6/10 for Portkey. The largest gap is in Ease of Use: 5/10 for Amazon S3 and 8/10 for Portkey.
Portkey has a free plan; Amazon S3 does not list one.
Amazon S3 has Object Storage, which Portkey lacks.
