Before "how do we route this?" comes "should this spend happen, on which model, and can we prove who allowed it?" — and that's the question that lands on finance and compliance. Portkey is a routing-first gateway with a longer track record: virtual keys, fallbacks, load balancing, a prompt-template marketplace, a native guardrail pipeline on every plan, and enforced budget caps on Enterprise. Its governance is real but tier-limited and per-request: budget enforcement is Enterprise-gated, guardrails apply per request rather than per org role, and there's no team/key cost ledger, no time-bounded approval workflow, and no signed audit chain. Wardin leads with governance and FinOps attribution on every plan: a budget hard-stop and org-scoped policy on the free tier, cost attributed to a team, a key, and a session, budget exceptions approved for a window that auto-revert, and an ED25519-signed receipt for every gateway-routed call — with routing caught up rather than started from.
For the buyer whose primary ask is routing sophistication, Portkey is ahead today: a multi-year head start on fallback chains and load-balancing strategies, a hosted prompt-template marketplace we don't have, a guardrail pipeline with 20+ checks from the free tier, and enforced budget caps on Enterprise. This isn't a routing-only tool with no enforcement. Where it stays shallow is the finance-and-evidence half: enforcement you have to reach Enterprise to get, scoped to a request rather than an org, with no ledger, no approval history, and no signed proof of what each call did.
Wardin puts enforcement, cost attribution, and evidence on every plan and scopes them to the organization, not the individual request: a budget hard-stop and role-scoped policy from the free tier, cost split down to a team, key, and session, budget exceptions that are approved for a window and auto-revert with retained history, and an ED25519-signed, hash-chained receipt for every gateway-routed call. Cache savings are reported split into exact-match versus semantic-match rather than blended into one number. Portkey's comparable enforcement is Enterprise-gated and per-request, and it produces no signed audit trail.
Choose Portkey if routing configuration and a prompt-template marketplace are the primary need and governance is secondary. Choose Wardin when the primary ask is "can this AI spend be stopped, attributed, approved, and audited" — on every plan, at the org level, with time-bounded budget approvals and a signed receipt chain, not a capability you unlock at Enterprise. Portkey decides how a request is routed. Wardin decides whether it runs — and hands you the proof.