Arbitex vs AI Gateways
AI gateways route traffic and track costs. Arbitex routes, inspects, and enforces policy — governance in the wire, not bolted on after.
Feature Comparison
| Feature | Arbitex | Portkey | Helicone | LiteLLM |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Model routing | ||||
| Cost controls | ||||
| DLP / PII inspection | ||||
| Custom policy engine | ||||
| Audit logging (security-grade) | ||||
| Hybrid Outpost (data local, SaaS mgmt) | ||||
| CISO-aligned buyer motion | ||||
| Real-time enforcement | ||||
| Single integration point |
Full capabilityPartial / limitedNot available
- Portkey's policy capabilities (partial) cover rate limits and routing rules, not content-based policy enforcement.
- Helicone's audit logging (partial) provides observability-grade usage logs, not security-grade content audit trails.
- LiteLLM's cost controls (partial) include basic tracking but not enforced governance caps.
- LiteLLM's Hybrid Outpost (full) reflects self-hosted deployment; the operator owns all security and compliance. Arbitex Hybrid Outpost is not self-hosted — the data plane runs in the customer's VPC, but the control plane (policy management, dashboards, administration) is always Arbitex-managed SaaS.
Where Arbitex Excels
- Convergence of routing and security. Arbitex is the only product where routing, inspection, and enforcement run in a single pipeline. No sidecar. No second vendor. The pipe is the policy.
- Single integration point. One base URL change. Every AI request flows through the gateway — routed, inspected, and policy-enforced. No split ownership between engineering and security tooling.
- CISO-aligned from day one. Arbitex is built for the security buyer. Security-grade audit logging, DLP inspection, and compliance reporting are core, not add-ons. When the CISO asks what data left the network through AI, Arbitex answers that question.
- Hybrid Outpost deployment. Data plane runs in your VPC — data never leaves your environment. Control plane is SaaS-hosted. No self-managed ops burden, no data residency risk.
Where Gateways Fit
AI gateways serve a real purpose, and the teams that use them have good reasons.
- Developer experience. Portkey and LiteLLM offer fast integration, strong SDK support, and a developer-first workflow. For teams that need model routing without compliance overhead, these tools get the job done quickly.
- Routing simplicity. If the only requirement is directing requests across multiple LLM providers with load balancing and failover, a dedicated routing gateway is a straightforward choice.
- Open-source community. LiteLLM has a large, active open-source community and wide model support. For development, testing, and low-stakes workloads, it is a useful and accessible tool.
- Observability. Helicone provides strong usage analytics, cost tracking, and prompt versioning for teams that need to understand how AI is being used across their organization.
The question is whether routing and observability are the full problem — or whether the organization also needs inspection, enforcement, and audit-ready governance. When the CISO is in the evaluation, that second set of requirements is what drives the decision.
See the governance difference.
Full platform access. One integration point.