An EU-first alternative to Portkey
Portkey is a strong US-based gateway and LLM-ops platform. 2kw.ai comes at the same problem from Europe: EU hosting by default on every tier — not as an enterprise option — and document extraction as a first-class workload next to the gateway.
Who should pick which?
2kw.ai vs Portkey at a glance
| 2kw.ai | Portkey | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Managed AI platform: gateway, document extraction, observability | AI gateway + LLM-ops platform: routing, observability, prompts, guardrails |
| Pricing | €99–€499/mo flat tiers, 7-day free trial | Free developer tier (10k logs/mo); Production $49/mo; Enterprise custom |
| Company & hosting | German company, EU-hosted by default on every tier | US company (San Francisco); data-residency options on enterprise plans |
| OpenAI-compatible API | ✓ | ✓ Works with OpenAI SDKs |
| Provider coverage | OpenAI, Anthropic, Azure OpenAI, Google Vertex AI, self-hosted via Ollama | 1,600+ models from 50+ providers |
| Document extraction | ✓ Schema-driven, 20+ input formats | — |
| Audio transcription | ✓ | — |
| Extraction quality | ✓ Grounding scores per extracted field | — |
| Prompt management | ✓ Versioned prompts | ✓ Templates, playground, versioning |
| Guardrails | Schema validation + grounding for extractions | ✓ LLM guardrails incl. PII redaction |
| Observability | ✓ Spend, operations, quality, latency + audit trail | ✓ Logs, traces, alerts (Production and above) |
| Certifications | GDPR-compliant, EU data residency, DPA on request | SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, HIPAA |
Comparison as of July 22, 2026. Portkey details from portkey.ai — check there for current information.
EU by default, not EU on request
Portkey is GDPR-compliant and offers data-residency options — on enterprise plans. That's the standard shape for US platforms: European processing is something you negotiate. 2kw.ai inverts it. Built-in models run EU-hosted for every customer, including the €99 tier, operated by Manfred Kunze Development GmbH in Germany. For procurement, that's one sentence instead of a contract addendum.
The gateway is half the job
Routing, retries, and spend dashboards matter — Portkey does them well. But the workloads European teams actually ship are mostly documents: extract the fields, transcribe the call, prove where a value came from. 2kw.ai treats that as the core product, with schema-driven extraction across 20+ formats and grounding scores per field, so the gateway and the pipeline share one platform, one dashboard, and one bill.
Common questions
Portkey's $49 tier prices a gateway-ops layer; model usage and your extraction pipeline live elsewhere. 2kw.ai's €99 tier includes the gateway plus document extraction, transcription, grounding, and EU operation by default. Compare the total stack you'd assemble, not the entry price.
Not in Portkey's sense. 2kw.ai's quality controls are schema validation and per-field grounding scores for extractions. If you need PII-redaction guardrails at the gateway layer today, Portkey has them and that's a fair reason to choose it.
Both work with the OpenAI SDKs, so applications typically switch by changing the base URL and API key, then moving model routing into 2kw.ai's config.
How this comparison was made
2kw.ai is our product, so read this page as a vendor comparison. Portkey facts were taken from portkey.ai on July 22, 2026; if something is outdated or wrong, tell us and we'll fix it.