Porter vs Unkey
Unkey scores higher on the AgentReady, 56/100 against 55/100. They differ on 8 of the 41 signals. Which ones decides whether an agent can adopt them without a person watching.
What each one is
Porter. Porter is a platform as a service (PaaS) that runs in your own cloud.
Unkey. Unkey is a developer platform for modern APIs that unifies infrastructure, allowing developers to deploy APIs instantly, route traffic through global gateways, and understand usage in one place.
Where Porter is ahead
Porter passes llms-full.txt / full agent docs and mcp discoverable, and Unkey does not. That is discover, whether an agent can find the product at all without being told it exists.
It also holds adopt: mcp integration available. Unkey misses it.
And on operate, retry behavior documented. Unkey misses it.
Where Unkey is ahead
Unkey passes clear product positioning, and Porter does not. That is discover, whether an agent can find the product at all without being told it exists.
It also holds understand: structured api reference, authentication documented and limits / constraints documented. Porter misses those.
What neither does
Both fail openapi / spec quality, request examples provided, response examples provided, errors and status codes documented, no mandatory sales call, agent-compatible signup flow, programmatic credential creation, structured, predictable output, machine-readable errors, idempotency support, rate-limit behavior predictable, agent compatibility verified. If your agent needs any of those, you will be building it yourself either way.
Score, pillar by pillar
The AgentReady splits into four pillars, scored separately, because a product can be easy to find and still impossible to adopt.
Discover. Porter leads 87 to 80. Porter misses clear product positioning; Unkey misses llms-full.txt / full agent docs, mcp discoverable.
Understand is whether an agent can read the docs and work out how the API behaves before calling it. Unkey leads 54 to 23. Porter misses structured api reference, openapi / spec quality, authentication documented, request examples provided, response examples provided, errors and status codes documented, limits / constraints documented; Unkey misses openapi / spec quality, request examples provided, response examples provided, errors and status codes documented.
Adopt. Porter leads 70 to 55. Porter misses no mandatory sales call, agent-compatible signup flow, programmatic credential creation; Unkey misses no mandatory sales call, agent-compatible signup flow, programmatic credential creation, mcp integration available.
Operate. Porter leads 41 to 35. Porter misses structured, predictable output, machine-readable errors, idempotency support, rate-limit behavior predictable, agent compatibility verified; Unkey misses structured, predictable output, machine-readable errors, retry behavior documented, idempotency support, rate-limit behavior predictable, agent compatibility verified.
Pricing
Porter starts at $6/mo with no free tier. Unkey starts at $5/mo and has a free tier.
| Porter plans | Unkey plans |
|---|---|
| Standard $6/mo GB RAM ($0.009 per hour), $13/mo vCPU ($0.019 per hour) | Starter $5/mo |
| - | Pro $25/mo |
| - | Business Custom |
Signal by signal
| Signal | Porter | Unkey |
|---|---|---|
| AgentReady | 55 | 56 |
| Discovery | 87 | 80 |
| Understanding | 23 | 54 |
| Adoption | 70 | 55 |
| Operability | 41 | 35 |
| Public API | Yes | Yes |
| MCP server | Yes | No |
| OpenAPI spec | Unknown | Yes |
| CLI | Yes | Yes |
| llms.txt | Yes | Yes |
| Self-serve signup | Yes | Yes |
| Free tier | No | Yes |
Which to pick
Signal counts are level here, so fit and price decide it. Full profiles: Porter and Unkey. Alternatives to each: Porter, Unkey.
An agent can fetch this as data: POST /v1/compare {"slugs": ["porter", "unkey"]}