OpenRouter vs Portkey vs Cloudflare AI Gateway
One key for every model — but two of the three gateways changed hands this year. Scores from the RXed AI Periodic Table v1.0 — identical 20-element scale, deterministic overall. How we audit →
At a glance
Scope = elements of the AI stack in the tool’s stated scope (dashed = honestly out of scope, never a penalty). Quality = how well it scores on what it covers. No single number — both axes, always.
The verdict
OpenRouter (Scope 17/20 · Quality 7/10) is the catalogue: 425 text models from 80+ providers on one endpoint (Lg 9.5, Sm 9) — for a 5.5% fee on every credit top-up, no self-hosting, and a Stripe acquisition announced 19/08/2026. Portkey (Scope 19/20 · Quality 6/10) is the control plane: best-in-class tracing (Tr 9), an MCP gateway logging every tool call (Pc 9), request-path guardrails (Gr 8.5), free to 10k logs then $49/month — Palo Alto Networks-owned since 29/05/2026; the MIT gateway on GitHub is your exit. Cloudflare AI Gateway (Scope 16/20 · Quality 4/10) is free on every plan with real spend limits (Gr 7.5), but no MCP path, no prompt management (Pr 2.5), exact-match caching only, and a 100,000-log cap that stops recording when full. Every model on one bill → OpenRouter. Knowing what your agents did and cost → Portkey, self-hosted if the acquirer worries you. Already on Cloudflare Workers → the gateway, on Workers Paid.
Where the quality sits
Family mean over covered elements only — a dash means the family is honestly outside that tool’s scope.
| OpenRouter Scope 17/20 · Quality 7/10 audited 2026-09-03 | Portkey Scope 19/20 · Quality 6/10 audited 2026-08-25 | Cloudflare AI Gateway Scope 16/20 · Quality 4/10 audited 2026-09-02 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vendor | OpenRouter, Inc. (acquiring: Stripe, announced 19/08/2026) | Portkey, Inc. — a Palo Alto Networks company since 29/05/2026 | Cloudflare, Inc. (NYSE: NET) |
| Origin | US | US | US |
| Pricing | Free tier €0 (25+ free models, 50 requests/day) · Pay-as-you-go: provider token rates passed through at cost plus a 5.5% fee on credit purchases, $0.80 minimum (~€0.75) · BYOK free to $25,000/month of list-price inference, then 5% · Enterprise: custom, fee discounts. Billed in USD. | Open source gateway: free, MIT, self-hosted. Developer: free forever, 10k recorded logs/month, 3-day log retention. Production: $49/month (~€45) for 100k logs, +$9 per extra 100k up to 3M. Enterprise: quote only (10M+ logs, SSO, VPC hosting, HIPAA/BAA, custom retention). | Core gateway €0 on every Cloudflare plan including Free: dashboard analytics, exact-match caching, rate limiting, persistent logs, request retry and fallback, BYOK, Dynamic Routing, spend limits and User Insights. Nothing to buy, nothing to install, no credit card. Four things do cost. Log storage is capped rather than billed: 100,000 logs total per account on Workers Free and 10 million per gateway on Workers Paid (~€4.60/month, from $5), and when the cap is hit new logs stop being saved until old ones are deleted. Guardrails bills as Workers AI token inference on every prompt and response it scans, so the safety cost scales with traffic volume. Logpush to a SIEM needs Workers Paid and runs 10 million records/month then ~€0.046 per million (from $0.05). Unified Billing adds a 5% fee on every credit purchase (a $100 top-up is charged at $105) while provider token rates pass through at no markup. Workers AI models bill at ~$0.011 per 1,000 Neurons with 10,000 Neurons a day free. Euro figures converted from published USD at roughly 0.92. |
| Pr Prompts | 7 | 8 | 3 |
| Em Embeddings | 8 | 6 | 6 |
| Cx Context | 6 | 6 | 3 |
| Tr Tracing | 8 | 9 | 7 |
| Lg LLM | 10 | 9 | 7 |
| Fc Function calling | 8 | 8 | 4 |
| Vx Vector store | — | 3 | — |
| Rg RAG | 6 | 3 | 3 |
| Gr Guardrails | 8 | 9 | 8 |
| Mm Multimodal | 9 | 7 | 7 |
| Ag Agents | 7 | 7 | 3 |
| Ft Fine-tuning | 3 | 4 | — |
| Fw Frameworks & harnesses | 9 | 9 | 5 |
| Ev Evaluations | 7 | 5 | 2 |
| Sm Small models | 9 | 7 | 7 |
| Ma Multi-agent | 6 | 6 | 2 |
| Sy Synthetic data | — | — | — |
| Pc Protocols | 7 | 9 | 2 |
| In Interpretability | — | 4 | — |
| Th Thinking models | 9 | 7 | 6 |
Hover any score for the written reason. Full detail: OpenRouter passport → · Portkey passport → · Cloudflare AI Gateway passport →