Braintrust vs Portkey
Facts come from each vendor's own pages; download numbers are the headline package of each tool in 2026-W40.
| Fact | Braintrust | Portkey |
|---|---|---|
| PyPI downloads, week (rank) | 1,650,096 (#7)braintrust | 765,740 (#9)portkey-ai |
| npm downloads, week (rank) | 2,046,537 (#3)braintrust | 280,520 (#6)portkey-ai |
| GitHub stars (rank) | 28 (#40)braintrustdata/braintrust-sdk-javascript | 13,144 (#10)Portkey-AI/gateway |
| PyPI series (12 weeks) | ||
| npm series (12 weeks) | ||
| Categories | Tracing & observability, Evaluation, Prompt management | Gateways with observability, Tracing & observability, Guardrails & safety, Prompt management |
| Status | Generally available | Generally available |
| Licence | Proprietary | MIT (open core) |
| Self-host | Enterprise only | Yes |
| OpenTelemetry | Native (OTLP) | Native (OTLP) |
| Pricing model | usage | usage |
| Entry price | $249/mo; Pro plan; usage billed on processed data and scores above included amounts; Starter is $0/month | $49/mo; Production plan $49/month with 100k recorded logs per month, +$9 per additional 100k requests; Developer plan free forever (10K requests); Enterprise custom |
| Free tier | Yes | Yes |
| Measurability | Measured (mapped SDK packages) | Measured (mapped SDK packages) |
| Sources | pricing · licence · self-host · OTel (checked 2026-10-07) | pricing · licence · self-host · OTel (checked 2026-10-07) |
More downloads means more package installs (including CI and dependencies), not a better product. See the methodology.