
OpenRouter
liteLLM
Helicone AI
LangSmith
Langfuse
APIPark
Eden AI
Build production-grade & reliable AI apps with Portkey

Langfuse
Braintrust
LangSmith
Helicone AI
FirstHelm - Steer your AI agents, don't just deploy them — a framework-agnostic AI agent control plane with live monitoring, guardrails, approvals, and EU AI Act / ISO 42001 compliance exports.

Which is more popular?
Based on our record, Portkey seems to be more popular. It has been mentioned 10 times since March 2021.
Website, pricing, platforms and company facts side by side.
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| Website | portkey.ai | firsthelm.dev |
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| Platforms | — | |
| Company | — | Startup from the United Kingdom · 1 - 9 employees · 2026 |
| Listed in |
In their own words, as submitted to SaaSHub.


No description of Portkey yet.
FirstHelm is a control plane for your AI agents. It sits between your agent fleet (n8n, OpenAI, Anthropic, CrewAI, LangChain, Copilot Studio, or any custom agent — 13 platform guides, no code needed to start) and the rest of the world. Every action gets logged, checked against your rules, and —...
What each product offers, as listed by its team.


Possible disadvantages
Walkthroughs and reviews on video.
PortKeys LH5H Review - High Brightness 5.2" Touchscreen Monitor with camera control
More videos
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How often each product is chosen within a category, 0–100% relative to the other.


As answered by people managing Portkey and FirstHelm.
FirstHelm's answer:
FirstHelm is a control plane, not just a monitoring tool. Existing platforms show you what your AI agents did — FirstHelm decides what they're allowed to do. It combines live monitoring, guardrails and human-in-the-loop approvals in one place, and uniquely generates audit trails and compliance exports mapped to six frameworks (EU AI Act, ISO 42001, SOC 2, UK GDPR, NIST AI RMF, FCA) from your own live data. It's also framework-agnostic: the same control plane supervises agents built on n8n, OpenAI, Anthropic, CrewAI, LangChain, Copilot Studio, Vertex AI, Bedrock, Agentforce and more.
FirstHelm's answer:
Observability tools (LangSmith, Langfuse, Helicone) trace what happened after the fact. FirstHelm intervenes before the fact: expensive, risky or irreversible actions are held for a human decision, and unanswered approvals expire safely — silence is not consent. So while competitors give developers dashboards, FirstHelm gives compliance teams proof: 38 controls, readiness scores computed live, and exportable reports an auditor actually accepts. And you keep your existing stack — FirstHelm supervises it, whatever it's built on.
FirstHelm's answer:
Two groups. Developers and technical teams running autonomous AI agents in production (on n8n, LangChain, OpenAI and similar) who need visibility and a safety net. And the people holding them accountable: founders, compliance officers and operations leads in regulated or EU-exposed businesses who must evidence oversight under the AI Act and ISO 42001. FirstHelm is the bridge between them — one system both can point at.
FirstHelm's answer:
FirstHelm was built in 2026 by a solo founder watching businesses deploy AI agents faster than they could govern them. Tracing tools could tell you what an agent had already done — but nothing could stop it doing the wrong thing, or prove to a regulator that someone was steering. With the EU AI Act fully enforceable since August 2026, that gap became a legal problem, not just an engineering one. FirstHelm is the answer: the helm for a fleet that was sailing itself. Bootstrapped, UK-built, live today.
FirstHelm's answer:
Cloud SaaS built on the Base44 platform (frontend, backend, hosting, Postgres-backed data layer), with a REST API and Python SDK for agent integration. Payments and subscriptions via Stripe. Email infrastructure on IONOS. The product itself integrates with 13+ agent frameworks via HTTP endpoints — n8n, OpenAI, Anthropic, CrewAI, LangChain, AutoGen, Copilot Studio, Agentforce, Vertex AI, Bedrock, Azure AI Foundry, watsonx, or any custom agent.
Share your experience with using Portkey and FirstHelm. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
Recommendations tracked on public social media and blogs since March 2021.


Developer gateways - MegaLLM, Portkey, LiteLLM, OpenRouter. The pitch is reliability, failover, cost, analytics. They are headless: you get an API, you bring your own interface. Great for shipping code, nothing to actually use without... - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
Portkey is a managed gateway and production control plane supporting 1,600+ LLMs with enterprise-grade governance (RBAC, SSO, granular budgets), compliance certifications (SOC2, ISO 27001, GDPR, HIPAA), and deployment options (SaaS,... - Source: dev.to / 4 months ago
For many teams, especially those starting out or with simpler needs, commercial solutions like Portkey, Helicone, OpenPipe, or LiteLLM Proxy offer off-the-shelf capabilities that cover many common proxy use cases (caching, logging, cost... - Source: dev.to / 6 months ago
Tracking FirstHelm since Sep 2026.
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