EAIP vs Portkey
Portkey is an AI gateway: one API in front of many model providers, with routing, caching, retries, cost controls and gateway-level guardrails.
| Dimension | EAIP | Portkey |
|---|---|---|
| Primary focus | Governed agent platform for regulated enterprises | AI gateway — routing, reliability and cost control across providers |
| Compliance runtime (DPDP/RBI/CERT-In) | DPDP consent ledger, Cedar policy checks, PII redaction and residency routing enforced on every call | Gateway guardrails (PII filters, content rules) at the request level |
| Data residency enforcement | Region read server-side from the tenant record; India tenants pinned to ap-south-1; financial identifiers hard-floored in-region | Routing rules can prefer regions; tenant-level legal mechanics (consent, erasure) out of scope |
| Deployment model | BYOC: full platform in your AWS account (ap-south-1), Terraform you can read; pausable to near-zero cost | SaaS gateway; enterprise/self-hosted deployments available |
| Policy engine | Cedar (AWS-authored policy language) evaluated in-process on every agent action | Config-based routing/guardrail rules (not a general policy language) |
| Audit trail | SHA-256 hash-chained, append-only, 7-year retention aligned with PMLA record-keeping | Request logs and analytics; not tamper-evident |
| Agent execution | Full agent execution engine: spec-driven loop, governed tools/MCP, memory, A2A | None — your app calls models through the gateway |
| Pricing model | Platform subscription; model tokens at cost via your own keys | Usage-based gateway pricing |
Where Portkey is the better fit
- Excellent multi-provider routing, fallbacks, caching and cost visibility
- Fast way to add provider redundancy and basic guardrails to any app
- Simple adoption: change one base URL, keep your existing code
Where EAIP is the better fit
- Governs the whole agent — tools, connectors, memory and data access — not only the model hop
- Tenant-level compliance objects (consent records, DPAs, erasure receipts) that a gateway cannot model
- BYOC in ap-south-1 with a verifiable audit chain across every action, not just LLM requests
Verdict
Use Portkey when the problem is the model call: reliability, cost and provider choice. Use EAIP when the problem is the agent: what it may access, on whose consent, in which country, with what evidence. Some teams run both — Portkey as a provider behind EAIP’s router.