Compare · Portkey and Selan
Is there a Portkey alternative for a team's Claude Code?
Yes, if the traffic is a team's coding tools rather than your own AI apps. Portkey is an AI gateway for the apps a company builds, and Claude Code reaches it with a Portkey API key in each developer's settings file. Palo Alto Networks bought it in May 2026. Selan is a hosted gateway that each developer signs in to once. For your own apps, Portkey is the better answer.
How do Portkey and Selan compare?
| Portkey | Selan | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | An AI gateway with logs, prompt management and guardrails, for apps and coding agents | A hosted gateway, with a CLI that launches Claude Code, Codex and OpenCode through it |
| Where it runs | Portkey's hosted gateway, your private cloud or VPC on Enterprise, or the open-source gateway on your own server | A hosted service, built and hosted in the EU. Nothing to run |
| Coding tools | Claude Code and Codex through npx portkey; skills only for Cursor | Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode and Claude Desktop |
| Providers | Claude on Anthropic, Amazon Bedrock or Google Vertex AI, and more than 1,600 models by provider slug | Anthropic, OpenAI, Google Vertex, OpenRouter, nexos.ai, Ollama Cloud and Kimi Code |
| A developer's credential | A Portkey API key, written into ~/.claude/settings.json | One sign-in with Google or Microsoft through selan login |
| Routing | Fallbacks, load balancing, retries and conditional routing, set in a config | The model you name. Subscriptions are tried first, then a key, and nothing is substituted silently |
| Limits | Budgets in dollars or tokens per workspace on a provider, reset weekly or monthly, plus rate limits | A spend limit per person, by day, week or month in UTC, on pay-per-use keys |
| Cost | Developer free (10,000 logs a month), Production $49 a month, Enterprise priced on request; the gateway's code is MIT | Free for up to three seats, no card |
Portkey is a gateway for the AI apps a company builds. Selan is a gateway a team signs in to for its coding tools.
When is Portkey the better answer?
When the traffic is your own product. Portkey keeps prompt templates with versions, logs every request with its trace, caches answers and checks inputs and outputs with guardrails. It reaches far more models than Selan does.
It also covers ground Selan does not. Claude can run on Amazon Bedrock through it, with a fallback to Anthropic or Vertex when one fails. Enterprise runs it in your own private cloud or VPC, and the open-source gateway runs on any server you keep. Its CLI also syncs a team's skills and MCP servers into each agent.
If your security team already runs Palo Alto Networks' Prisma AIRS, Portkey is now part of it. If no team runs coding tools through a gateway, you do not need Selan.
What changed when Palo Alto Networks bought Portkey?
Palo Alto Networks closed its purchase of Portkey on 29 May 2026. Portkey's documentation now calls the product Prisma AIRS AI Gateway. Palo Alto Networks said it would keep supporting existing and new Portkey customers.
The gateway's code is still on GitHub under the MIT licence. Its README announces a 2.0 pre-release that merges Portkey's enterprise gateway into the open-source one.
Can Portkey and Selan use Claude subscriptions?
Portkey passes a Max plan or Anthropic OAuth login through to Anthropic. Its docs say that usage shows as $0 in Portkey, since Anthropic bills the plan directly. Portkey still records the request count, tokens, latency and traces.
Selan runs on the Claude and ChatGPT accounts and API keys your company connects. Requests go to subscription accounts first and fall through to a key billed per token only when they are capped. Selan reads each Claude account's 5-hour and 7-day windows from every response.
When is Selan the better answer?
When the traffic is a team's coding tools and nobody wants to hand out gateway keys. A
developer runs selan login once, then selan claude,
selan codex or selan opencode. Claude Desktop goes through the
same gateway with one settings file.
An owner connects the company's accounts and keys once, and switches on the models the team may use. A limit per person applies across every pay-per-use key. With secret scanning on, a secret it recognises is replaced before the request leaves.
The trade-off is that requests travel through Selan, so if Selan is unavailable those requests fail. Your accounts can still be used directly.
Which providers serve which models is in models and providers, limits per person are on the spend page, and scanning is in the secret scanning docs.
How do you move Claude Code from Portkey to Selan?
Portkey's setup writes ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL, ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN
and ANTHROPIC_CUSTOM_HEADERS into ~/.claude/settings.json.
selan claude sets the base URL and token for the session it launches, even
over a value pinned in that file. It leaves ANTHROPIC_CUSTOM_HEADERS alone,
so delete Portkey's headers line, which carries your Portkey key, and any Portkey model
ids beside it.
Connect the same Anthropic or Vertex accounts in Selan and switch on their models. You can keep Portkey for your own apps and run the team's coding tools through Selan. Keeping provider keys off laptops is covered in Claude Code without API keys on laptops.
Free for up to three seats, and the Free plan needs no card.
The short version
- Portkey is an AI gateway for a company's own apps, now part of Palo Alto Networks' Prisma AIRS.
- It reaches Bedrock and far more models than Selan, with fallbacks, caching and guardrails.
- Claude Code reaches it with a Portkey API key in each developer's settings file.
- Selan is hosted in the EU: one sign-in per person, no provider key on the laptop, and a spend limit per person.
What Portkey does is as its documentation (Claude Code, Claude Code with Anthropic, the Portkey CLI and budget limits pages), its pricing page and its gateway's README on GitHub described it, read on 31 October 2026, with Palo Alto Networks' press release of 29 May 2026. It changes: check the date before relying on it. What Selan does is as its CLI and docs stated it on that date.