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14 Best Bifrost LLM Gateway Alternatives (2026)
The top alternatives to Bifrost in the LLM Gateways space, compared on features, pricing, and what they're best at.
Updated March 10, 2026
Why look beyond Bifrost?
Bifrost is an open-source LLM gateway from Maxim AI, written in Go and self-hosted. It puts 15+ providers including OpenAI, Anthropic, AWS Bedrock, and Google Vertex behind one OpenAI-compatible API, so switching models is a config change rather than a code change.
Self-hosting is the trade. You run the gateway, scale it, and stay on top of provider changes yourself, and extending it means working in Go rather than the language your application is written in. Bifrost also covers routing and reliability rather than the full picture around it, so evaluation, prompt management, and production debugging come from somewhere else in your stack.
The 14 Bifrost alternatives below cover both, from self-hosted gateways like LiteLLM to hosted platforms that fold routing, observability, and evals into one product. Each links to a full profile and a head-to-head comparison.
Common reasons users explore alternatives
- You run, scale, and monitor the gateway yourself
- Observability is exported to other tools rather than stored in the gateway
- Evals live in Maxim's separate platform, priced per seat from $29/month
- Guardrails, SSO, RBAC, and audit logs require Enterprise
Top alternatives to Bifrost
OpenRouter
One OpenAI-compatible API for 500+ models from 80+ providers
Cloudflare AI Gateway
Edge-deployed AI gateway
Vercel AI Gateway
One API key for hundreds of models
Portkey
Unified API across major providers
LiteLLM
OpenAI-compatible proxy for 140+ providers
Stainless
SDK generation
Helicone
LLM observability and monitoring
Unify
Martian
Intelligent model routing based on prompt type
Kong AI Gateway
AI traffic management
Requesty
400+ model access
Apigee AI Gateway
Google Cloud AI traffic management
The Token Company
Token compression
TrueFoundry
AI Gateway with routing, fallbacks, rate limits, and budgets
OrcaRouter
orcarouter/auto adaptive routing per request
InWorld AI
Conditional routing with CEL expressions on request metadata
Orq.ai
AI gateway for 500+ models with fallbacks, retries, and load balancing
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