nexos.ai vs Portkey AI: Brand overview
To start off, let’s explore each brand’s background, team, backing, and historical record.
nexos.ai
Headquartered in Vilnius, Lithuania, nexos.ai is an early-stage startup created by Tomas Okmanas and Eimantas Sabaliauskas, entrepreneurs with a strong tech background track record: founding NordVPN, a cybersecurity unicorn, Oxylabs, Hostinger, and more. Launched in 2024, nexos.ai has already closed $8 million in funding, with Index Ventures leading the first investment round.
The project positions itself as an all-in-one AI platform for enterprises. At a product level, it combines two key platforms: AI Workspace for observability and org-wide productivity, and AI Gateway, a unified API for developers to build AI products.
Portkey AI
Portkey AI, or, as they commonly refer to themselves, simply Portkey, was founded in early 2023 by Rohit Agarwal and Ayush Garg. In the same year, the company received a $3 million investment to continue building key features.
The platform primarily targets AI tech leaders and builders, positioning itself as a must-have production stack for AI-centric projects, equipping AI teams with everything they need to go to production fast.
Key features overview
When it comes to product, both companies target a similar niche and empower users with unified AI, but there are important distinctions. Below, we’ll provide an overview of nexos.ai and Portkey, and then dive deeper into each key difference in a dedicated section.
nexos.ai key features
nexos.ai has a distinct product split between two main offerings: AI Workspace and AI Gateway.
AI Workspace provides a unified interface for enterprise-grade productivity and built-in security at the same time. It can be used by any enterprise team, from Marketing to Finance to Engineering, as a model-agnostic and multi-feature alternative to a single AI model typically used by employees.
The Workspace and Gateway combine:
- Chat, with multiple AI models through a single interface.
- Compare Models for AI experiments and to compare outputs of different models simultaneously.
- Projects, for context-resistant chat folders and organization; upload files, and the AI will remember them forever via retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) architecture.
- Assistants for task-specific AI helpers with persistent instructions and memory plus context from Projects.
- Governance and Observability for enterprise-grade management of all AI usage, budget controls, and more.
- Guardrails for custom input and output rules to secure sensitive info from leaking to LLMs.
- Unified endpoint for LLM API routing and AI development.
Portkey AI key features
Similar to nexos.ai, Portkey provides AI orchestration and connects users to over 250 AI models via a single, unified API. With Portkey, individuals, teams, and enterprises can build sophisticated AI systems, automate fallbacks, manage model routing, and more.
As a comprehensive offering, Portkey provides:
- AI Gateway a single, consistent solution for AI model APIs, with load balancing, smart LLM routing, fallbacks.
- Observability and Logs for real-time insights, key AU usage metrics, hosting local models, and rate limits.
- Prompt library, with collaborative features to create, templatize, and iterate repetitive prompts easily and team-wide.
- Guardrails that monitor each user query for compliance and seamlessly route LLM queries.
- Agentic AI, natively integrated in Portkey’s API gateways and guardrails, based on industry-leading frameworks.
Org-wide AI deployment and scalability
Before we go deeper into key feature descriptions, let’s address the overall scalability of both platforms. This is an essential aspect to consider, even before comparing specific features, for a simple reason: if a platform is not scalable, no advanced features are worth implementing. A proper, enterprise-grade AI platform needs to not only be scalable but also realistically serve large organizations across different departments, teams, roles, and responsibilities.
nexos.ai: Onboard the entire org with a hybrid approach
nexos.ai allows for fast, seamless onboarding of entire enterprises. Some case studies suggest it’s possible to reach record-high adoption rates within the first month, and the initial setup and deployment can take as little as 48 hours.
It also offers granular-level permissions for model access, allowing admins to restrict access to certain models for certain teams or individuals.
In practice, this customization allows for a more mindful use of token budget: Marketing uses cheaper, semantic language models like ChatGPT, Engineering uses more expensive, coding-centric LLMs like Claude.
Portkey: Integrate AI development first, educate non-tech teams
Portkey is more focused on serving developers and AI builders, so org-wide deployment might be a challenge, especially for less technically advanced teams.
Developers can integrate Portkey in just three lines of code, with no changes to your existing stack, and instantly access over 1600 leading and niche AI models. Admins get in-depth analytics, governance, and observability, with granular tracking and advanced guardrails.
However, for casual users, understanding the platform and switching to Portkey from a user-centric platform like ChatGPT, for example, might be challenging.
nexos.ai vs Portkey AI: Data security, privacy, and compliance
Now that advanced AI models are becoming increasingly accessible, security and compliance become critical issues in large-scale integrations, including enterprise use cases for employees and technical teams. Organizations, in particular, face strict regulatory compliance requirements that consumer-grade tools don’t need to adhere to.
That’s where having a dedicated enterprise-grade AI platform is helpful. It’s not only designed to support collaborative teams and a large number of employees, but also to keep company information secure and all AI practices compliant.
nexos.ai: Highly-customizable compliance
Security is a core value proposition for nexos.ai, with a platform built from the ground up to prevent data leaks and ensure compliance. The platform offers built-in AI security with AI guardrails to control both input and output of sensitive information, preventing unauthorized data exposure.
The platform provides comprehensive tracking of all AI activities across teams, giving administrators complete visibility into enterprise-wide AI usage and 100% oversight of every single AI request. This monitoring capability helps organizations prevent shadow AI usage while enabling secure access to pre-approved LLMs with organizational policies in place.
Portkey: Enterprise-grade compliance
Portkey AI has invested heavily in compliance certifications, including SOC 2, GDPR, ISO 27001, and HIPAA. These make the platform suitable for organizations with complex compliance requirements.
Beyond certifications, Portkey offers comprehensive access controls, audit trails, and compliance checks. Portkey specifically highlights its enterprise-ready approach to security and claims to meet "the most demanding industry standards." This will be especially helpful for organizations that handle sensitive client information, such as those in the healthtech, finance, and similar sectors.
nexos.ai vs Portkey: A deeper look into the platforms
When comparing enterprise AI tools, the technical architecture reveals the true strengths and limitations of each platform.
Both nexos.ai and Portkey offer comprehensive solutions, but their approaches to core infrastructure components, from platform design to observability, reflect fundamentally different approaches to how organizations should implement AI.
When selecting the solution for your enterprise, consider the following tech stack, along with how it approaches AI adoption.
AI platform: Hybrid vs Technical use cases
nexos.ai positions itself as "the unified, enterprise-grade platform that brings workspaces, model access, and governance together." This hybrid approach combines both business-facing interfaces and developer tools within a single ecosystem.
The platform is model-agnostic, allowing organizations to select different LLMs based on specific use cases. With Projects and Assistants, AI use also becomes more context-aware and memory-reliant. Teams configure these features with files, documentation, and other relevant data, and, as a result, get human-sounding responses, with no context repetition.
This flexibility preserves human value while maximizing AI capabilities across varied contexts. It’s a trade-off between accessibility and security, as the platform is structured to provide appropriate access levels while maintaining consistent controls across all interactions.
In contrast to nexos.ai’s hybrid approach and its middle ground between tech and non-tech AI applications in enterprise, Portkey AI leans significantly more towards a tech-focused approach. Similar to the competitor, Portkey also offers close to unlimited model access and intelligent LLM routing, but it’s targeted much heavily for developer and engineering teams.
As a self-proclaimed “production stack for GenAI builders,” the platform equips enterprises with all tools needed for end-to-end LLM orchestration. Overall, it focuses on a complete production infrastructure for technical AI teams. When it comes to teams like Marketing, Finance, HR, Customer support, and others, this solution is much too technicqally advanced and doesn’t offer a plug-and-play AI workspace.
While nexos.ai balances both business and technical users, Portkey leans more heavily toward serving AI engineering teams with an infrastructure-first approach. Its architecture prioritizes technical depth over org-wide accessibility.
AI gateway: API for artificial intelligence applications
nexos.ai provides a unified endpoint for accessing multiple AI models, all while built-in security controls make sure no sensitive information leaks to training sets or the public. The LLM gateway handles routing, load balancing, and fallback, so that if your preferred LLM fails, LLM routing automatically redirects traffic to an alternative model and the end user won’t even notice.
Portkey’s API gateways offering is quite similar to nexos.ai. It provides performance-optimized LLM routing, load balancing, and sophisticated fallback mechanisms to minimize latency. It’s particularly suitable for enterprise applications that need highly complex infrastructure.
AI observability: Tracking and monitoring AI usage
With nexos.ai’s dual focus on security and governance, observability includes comprehensive controls, with role-based access, budget management, and complete audit trails to prevent leaks, simplify oversight, and stay under budget.
Portkey AI specializes in deep technical monitoring with a real-time observability dashboard to measure performance & efficiency across multiple metrics. This detailed technical insight allows AI engineering teams to optimize model performance while maintaining appropriate usage controls and rate limits.
AI guardrails: Hands-on security and compliance controls
nexos.ai focuses on comprehensive data protection with guardrails that actively control both input and output of sensitive information. The platform automatically detects and redacts Personally Identifiable Information (PII), preventing data leaks while allowing teams to work productively with AI. This approach directly addresses concerns about exposing sensitive corporate information to external AI models.
Portkey AI provides technical guardrails that monitor each user query for compliance with organizational policies and procedures. The system offers developer-oriented controls for implementing guardrails programmatically, with guardrails integrated into the API gateway for seamless enforcement. The platform helps block prompt injections and ensures consistent guardrail application across all AI interactions.
Prompt management
Provides prompt management through its Projects and Assistants features, creating structured environments where prompts maintain context and persist across conversations. This approach focuses on making prompt management accessible to non-technical users while maintaining consistency and avoiding AI security risks. The platform includes a prompt library in its documentation to help teams standardize effective prompts. Additionally, more traditional prompts are available through Documentation, but as of now, there’s no advanced integration for prompts directly within the workspace.
However, advanced prompt management is one of the key selling points of Portkey. Although it won’t necessarily serve non-technical teams, such as Marketing, Sales, and HR, the prompt engineering backbone will be irreplaceable for AI engineers. You can collaborate with others to create, iterate, edit, and deploy sophisticated prompts on Portkey, centralize them, and maintain unified workflows across the organization.
Team and organization features
nexos.ai creates a shared AI workspace to run, manage, and scale AI projects across your teams, enabling collaboration across technical and non-technical departments. The platform allows teams to collaborate on AI projects using your files, prompts, and chats, making cross-functional AI adoption more accessible. This approach aims to democratize AI use while maintaining central governance.
Portkey AI focuses on equipping AI teams with everything they need to go to production, with features optimized for technical collaboration. Their team capabilities are designed for AI engineering teams building production systems, with tools for collaborative development, testing, and deployment. While powerful for technical teams, these features may present a steeper learning curve for business users.
Key differences between nexos.ai and Portkey AI
All in all, differences between nexos.ai and Portkey lie in the target audience and user persona.
Portkey focuses purely on the developer toolkit, and each feature ultimately serves technical teams or technically advanced admins. Portkey's approach is more developer-centric, prioritizing API flexibility over a comprehensive workspace interface.
nexos.ai provides a more comprehensive, universal workspace to access all AI models according to the use case. It equally serves creative teams with productivity tools and developer teams with an LLM gateway solution, as well as admins, with full controls in guardrails, observability, and governance.
Which platform is the right AI platform for you?
According to our nexos.ai vs Portkey AI review, there’s no clear winner. For organizations looking for full-scale AI adoption across technical and non-technical departments, nexos.ai offers significant advantages. Its unified interface is accessible to diverse users while maintaining enterprise-grade security.
The choice ultimately depends on your organization's primary focus and team composition. If your priority is developer-led AI implementation with maximum technical flexibility, Portkey's developer-centric approach may align better with your needs.
However, if you're seeking organization-wide AI adoption with strong governance, security, and accessibility for all departments, nexos.ai provides a more cohesive solution that balances technical capabilities with business usability.
Curious how nexos.ai stacks up against other AI tools? We have also compared nexos.ai with the following tools: