14 Best Cloudflare AI Gateway Alternatives & Competitors
The top alternatives to Cloudflare AI Gateway in the LLM Gateways space, compared on features, pricing, and what they're best at.
Updated March 9, 2026
Why look beyond Cloudflare AI Gateway?
Cloudflare AI Gateway is a unified API gateway for AI applications that provides observability, caching, rate limiting, and cost tracking across multiple LLM providers. Available on all Cloudflare plans, the core gateway features are free with no per-call fees beyond the Cloudflare subscription. The platform connects popular providers like Workers AI, Hugging Face, OpenAI, and Anthropic with a single line of code, offering centralized visibility and control. Built into Cloudflare global network infrastructure, AI Gateway provides edge-level caching, request retries, model fallbacks, and analytics. The free tier includes 100,000 AI Gateway logs per month, while the Workers Paid plan starting at USD 5/month provides 1 million logs. In 2026, Cloudflare introduced Unified Billing, allowing customers to pay for third-party model usage directly through Cloudflare invoices. While the platform excels at cost-effectiveness and integration with Cloudflare existing services, it adds 10-50ms of proxy latency, lacks deep AI observability features like token-level tracing, and enforces strict log retention caps that can require manual management at scale.
- −Adds 10-50ms proxy latency to every request
- −Lacks token-level tracing and prompt analysis
- −Strict log retention caps require manual management at scale
Top Alternatives to Cloudflare AI Gateway
Respan is a unified AI gateway that provides a single API endpoint to access 250+ LLMs from every major provider. It offers intelligent model routing, fallback strategies, cost optimization, load balancing, and real-time observability—enabling teams to build resilient AI applications without vendor lock-in. Respan simplifies multi-model orchestration with built-in caching, rate limiting, and usage analytics across all providers.
OpenRouter is a unified LLM gateway providing OpenAI-compatible API access to 300+ models across 60+ providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Mistral, and more). Pay-as-you-go with passthrough rates plus a 5.5% platform fee on credit purchases; free tier with 25+ models capped at 50 requests/day.
Vercel AI Gateway provides a unified API for accessing multiple LLM providers with built-in caching, rate limiting, and fallback routing. Integrated into the Vercel platform, it offers edge-optimized inference, usage analytics, and seamless integration with the Vercel AI SDK for production AI applications.
Portkey is an AI gateway that provides a unified API for 200+ LLMs with built-in reliability features including automatic retries, fallbacks, load balancing, and caching. The platform includes observability with detailed request logs, cost tracking, and performance analytics. Portkey also offers guardrails, access controls, and virtual keys for managing LLM usage across teams.
High-performance open-source LLM gateway written in Go. Handles ~10k RPS with <10ms latency.
LiteLLM is an open-source LLM proxy that translates OpenAI-format API calls to 100+ LLM providers. It provides a standardized interface for calling models from Anthropic, Google, Azure, AWS Bedrock, and dozens more. LiteLLM is popular as a self-hosted gateway with features like spend tracking, rate limiting, and team management.
Helicone is an open-source LLM observability and proxy platform. By adding a single line of code, developers get request logging, cost tracking, caching, rate limiting, and analytics for their LLM applications. Helicone supports all major LLM providers and can function as both a gateway proxy and a logging-only integration.
Powers the official SDKs for OpenAI, Anthropic, and others. The de facto gateway interface layer.
Unify provides intelligent LLM routing that automatically selects the optimal model and provider for each request based on quality, cost, and latency constraints. It benchmarks 100+ endpoints across providers and dynamically routes traffic to maximize performance while minimizing costs.
Kong AI Gateway extends the popular Kong API gateway with AI-specific capabilities including multi-LLM routing, prompt engineering, semantic caching, rate limiting, and cost management.
Martian is an intelligent model router that automatically selects the best LLM for each request based on the prompt content, required capabilities, and cost constraints. Using proprietary routing models, Martian optimizes for quality and cost simultaneously, helping teams reduce LLM spend while maintaining or improving output quality.
Unified LLM gateway and router with intelligent routing, automatic failover, cost optimization, and PII redaction. Access 400+ models through a single API.
Google Cloud's Apigee includes AI gateway capabilities for managing and securing generative AI API traffic, with model routing, token-based rate limiting, content moderation, and comprehensive analytics.
Compression middleware that sits between apps and LLMs, improving output quality while reducing token costs.