Onyx vs Portkey (2026): Pricing, Features & Verdict
Portkey is our pick, scoring 7.8/10 against 7.2/10 for Onyx on our AI Software criteria. Its biggest advantage: higher Analytics score (9/10 vs 5/10). For 10 users, Onyx and Portkey are both free; both Onyx and Portkey have a free plan.
Last updated: November 2026
Onyx
7.2/10
Onyx, formerly Danswer, is an open-source AI assistant and enterprise search tool that lets staff search and chat across 50+ connected workplace apps with permissions respected.
Portkey
7.8/10
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 | | |
|---|---|---|
| Scores | ||
| Overall Rating | 7.2/10 | 7.8/10 |
| Integration | 8/10 | 9/10 |
| Analytics | 5/10 | 9/10 |
| Customization | 9/10 | 7/10 |
| Ease of Use | 6/10 | 8/10 |
| Support | 5/10 | 6/10 |
| Cost | 8/10 | 7/10 |
| Scalability | 7/10 | 8/10 |
| Security | 8/10 | 8/10 |
| Output Quality | 7/10 | Not listed |
| Pricing | ||
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Cheapest paid plan | $20/user/mo Business | $49/mo Production |
| Estimated cost for 10 users | Free Community Edition (self-hosted) | Free Open Source |
| Features | ||
| AI Agents | Not listed | |
| API Access | Not listed | |
| Chatbots | Not listed | |
| Code Generation | Not listed | |
| Enterprise Controls | Not listed | |
| Image Generation | Not listed | |
| Knowledge Base Search | Not listed | |
| Private Deployment | Not listed | |
| Text Generation | Not listed | |
| Voice and Audio | Not listed | |
| More features | ||
| API and CLI | Not listed | |
| Managed WordPress | Not listed | |
| Object Storage | Not listed | |
| Uptime SLA | Not listed | |
| Dedicated Servers | Not listed | |
| VPS Hosting | Not listed | |
| Shared Hosting | Not listed | |
Onyx vs Portkey cost by team size
Onyx and Portkey cost the same at every team size we checked.
| Team size | Onyx | Portkey |
|---|---|---|
| 1 user | FreeCommunity Edition (self-hosted) | FreeOpen Source |
| 5 users | FreeCommunity Edition (self-hosted) | FreeOpen Source |
| 10 users | FreeCommunity Edition (self-hosted) | FreeOpen Source |
| 25 users | FreeCommunity Edition (self-hosted) | FreeOpen Source |
| 50 users | FreeCommunity Edition (self-hosted) | 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 Onyx and Portkey suit
Portkey fits developers better than Onyx.
| Audience | Onyx | Portkey |
|---|---|---|
| Developers | 7/10It is MIT-licensed open source with a REST API, ingestion API, MCP server and LLM gateway, but agents are set up through configuration rather than a visual builder. | 9/10Setup takes a few lines of code with OpenAI-compatible SDKs, and there is a free tier and an open-source gateway. |
| Enterprise | 8/10The product is built around permission-aware search across company tools, with SSO, RBAC, air-gapped deployment and named enterprise customers including Netflix, Ramp and Thales. | 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. |
| Startups | 7/10The free Community Edition and $20 per user Business plan are affordable, but small teams have to run the infrastructure or pay for the cloud plan. | 7/10A free tier and a $49 Production plan keep the entry cost low. |
| Government | 6/10Air-gapped and region-specific deployments are offered, but there is no evidence of government-specific certifications. | Not rated |
| IT Teams | 8/10IT teams can self-host it with Docker, Kubernetes or Helm, configure connectors and models, and keep data inside their own infrastructure. | Not rated |
| SaaS Companies | Not rated | 8/10Built for teams running production GenAI features across multiple LLM providers. |
| Small Business | 5/10The cloud trial lowers the barrier to entry, but the self-hosted resource needs and enterprise-oriented features add overhead for very small teams. | Not rated |
Which One Should You Choose?
Why choose Onyx
- Higher Customization score (9/10 vs 7/10)
- Higher Cost score (8/10 vs 7/10)
Why choose Portkey
- Higher Analytics score (9/10 vs 5/10)
- Higher Ease of Use score (8/10 vs 6/10)
- Better fit for developers (9/10 vs 7/10)
Pros & Cons
Onyx
Pros
- The Community Edition is MIT-licensed and free to self-host, with chat, RAG, agents and actions included.
- More than 50 connectors with continuous sync and hybrid search with reranking, covering Slack, Drive, Confluence, GitHub, Jira and others.
- You can use cloud models from OpenAI, Anthropic or Gemini, or run open-weight models on your own GPUs through Ollama, vLLM or LiteLLM.
- It can be deployed in your own cloud, on bare metal or fully air-gapped, so documents and model traffic stay inside your environment.
- The published $20 per user per month Business price is easy to compare, while Glean does not publish its pricing.
- Onyx Cloud holds SOC 2 Type II and states GDPR compliance, with yearly penetration tests.
Cons
- Self-hosting is a real operations commitment: about eleven services, at least 4 vCPU and 10 GB of RAM, and you own upgrades, backups and monitoring.
- Permission inheritance from sources, SSO, SCIM group sync and query analytics need the paid Enterprise Edition.
- The first full sync of large sources can take days, and changing the embedding model triggers a full re-index.
- The search index runs on a fixed backend, so you cannot swap in a different vector store.
- There are almost no reviews on G2 or Capterra, so there is little independent user feedback to go on.
- Enterprise pricing is not published, and the Business plan comes with community support only.
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
Portkey scores higher on our AI Software criteria: 7.8/10 against 7.2/10 for Onyx. The largest gap is in Analytics: 5/10 for Onyx and 9/10 for Portkey.
Both are free for 10 users.
Yes, both Onyx and Portkey have a free plan.
Portkey is the better fit for developers: we rate it 9/10 for them, against 7/10 for Onyx.
