Portkey alternative that restores PII: Nonimo Gateway

Portkey redacts personal data by swapping it for numbered placeholders, and its own documentation says that redaction “is irreversible by design”. If your staff need the client’s real name in the letter the model drafts, you need a proxy that puts the values back. That is what Nonimo Gateway does.

Nonimo Gateway runs on your own servers. See plans and get in touch.

This guide explains what Portkey does with personal data, where that falls short when the output is meant for a person, and how Nonimo Gateway fills the gap.

Portkey in brief

Portkey is one gateway for routing, logging, retries, fallbacks and guardrails across many model providers. Since 29 May 2026 it belongs to Palo Alto Networks, which describes it as “the core AI Gateway for Prisma AIRS”. Palo Alto Networks also owns Protect AI, the company behind LLM Guard; see our LLM Guard alternative guide.

It publishes a free Developer plan, a Production plan at $49 a month and custom Enterprise pricing. Which plan includes PII redaction is not clear from its official pages.

Where Portkey’s PII redaction falls short

The values do not come back. “Each instance receives a numbered identifier”, such as {{EMAIL_ADDRESS_1}}, and “Redaction is irreversible by design.” A solicitor’s letter comes back addressed to a placeholder, an accountant’s summary attaches every figure to one, and someone retypes the names by hand, which is where errors creep in.

Streams are not rewritten. Input guardrails run before the stream starts, but “Output guardrails on streaming requests are informational only.” On a streamed answer, an output check can tell you something was there; it does not change what the user sees.

Not in the free gateway. The open-source README lists “PII Redaction” under the Gateway Enterprise Version, not under the open-source features.

No published languages, no European IDs on the list. The documented entity list is phone numbers, email addresses, location information, IP addresses, Social Security numbers, names and credit card information. Supported languages are not published, and no European national ID appears on the list.

Some teams try to bridge the gap by keeping a copy of the prompt and matching placeholders back by hand. It gets fragile when the model rephrases or merges placeholders, and it stores the sensitive values in yet another place you then have to protect.

Portkey compared with Nonimo Gateway

	Portkey	Nonimo Gateway
What it is	Full AI gateway: routing, logs, fallbacks, guardrails	Private proxy focused on personal data in LLM calls
Real values in the response	No, “irreversible by design”	Yes, restored
Output checks on streams	Informational only	Real values back in the answer
PII in the free open-source version	Listed under Enterprise	Not applicable
Where it runs	Portkey Cloud, open-source gateway, or Enterprise hybrid and private cloud	On your own servers
Languages and IDs	Languages not published; no European IDs listed	National documents per country, such as Spanish DNI/NIE/NIF, German Steuer-ID, French NIR, Italian codice fiscale, Brazilian CPF, Mexican RFC and CURP
Reporting	transformed flag	Counts of what was replaced, without the content
Published plans	Developer free, Production $49/month, Enterprise custom	Per server, with your own OpenAI key

How Nonimo Gateway does it

Nonimo Gateway does one job: it keeps personal data out of your LLM API calls and gives you the real values back. It runs on your own servers and exposes an OpenAI-compatible API, so you change base_url and keep your code:

import os
from openai import OpenAI

client = OpenAI(
    base_url="https://llm-gateway.your-company.internal/v1",  # your Nonimo Gateway
    api_key=os.environ["OPENAI_API_KEY"],  # your own OpenAI key
)

It replaces personal data in what goes out and restores the real values in the response. It recognises the national documents and numbers of each country it serves, including Spain’s CUPS number alongside the national IDs above. You use your own OpenAI key, and plans and prices are on the Nonimo Gateway page. If you run LiteLLM as your router, there is a plugin for it; see LiteLLM PII guardrails.

Replacing values reversibly is pseudonymisation; our guide to de-identified versus anonymised data explains what that does and does not change. If you need to explain your controls to an insurer, see the AI questions on cyber insurance forms. For open-source building blocks, see Microsoft Presidio alternative.

Get the names back in the answer

If your output is meant for a client, a patient or a colleague, placeholders are not the end of the job. Nonimo Gateway takes the personal data out on the way in and puts it back on the way out. See Nonimo Gateway’s plans and get in touch.

Sources

Checked 20 October 2026.

• Portkey, gateway repository. Open-source gateway, PII redaction listed under the Enterprise version.
• Portkey, guardrails. Inputs and outputs, streaming behaviour, plan tiers of checks.
• Portkey, PII redaction. Numbered placeholders, transformed flag, irreversible redaction, entity list.
• Portkey, list of guardrail checks. Partner PII engines.
• Portkey, private cloud deployments. Hybrid deployment model.
• Portkey, pricing. Developer, Production and Enterprise plans.
• Palo Alto Networks, Portkey acquisition completed. Closing date and Prisma AIRS role.
• Palo Alto Networks, Protect AI acquisition completed. LLM Guard’s owner.

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This page is for information. Product details of other vendors were checked on their official pages on 20 October 2026 and can change.