Best Portkey Alternative for Scaling Your GenAI Apps

As AI applications move from prototypes to production, the infrastructure layer between your code and model providers becomes critical. Portkey has established itself as a well-known AI gateway and LLMOps platform, offering a unified API across 1,600+ LLMs, observability, guardrails, and governance features. However, teams scaling high-throughput GenAI systems often encounter limitations around performance overhead, deployment flexibility, and total cost of ownership that prompt them to evaluate alternatives.

This guide examines the leading Portkey alternatives in 2025 and explains why Bifrost by Maxim AI stands out as the top choice for teams building production-grade AI applications.

Why Teams Look Beyond Portkey

Portkey provides a comprehensive control plane for GenAI workloads, including multi-provider routing, semantic caching, prompt management, and enterprise governance. For many teams, it works well during early development. But as production demands scale, several factors push teams to evaluate alternatives:

• Performance at high throughput: Gateway-level latency compounds at scale. When serving thousands of requests per second, even small overhead per request translates into meaningful delays across the system.
• Deployment model constraints: Portkey's most advanced governance and compliance features (policy-as-code, regional data residency) are gated behind higher-tier enterprise plans, and self-hosted flexibility can be limited for teams with strict data sovereignty requirements.
• Full lifecycle integration: Portkey focuses primarily on the gateway and observability layer. Teams that need tightly integrated experimentation, simulation, evaluation, and observability across the full AI lifecycle often find themselves stitching together multiple tools.
• Open-source transparency: While Portkey's open-source gateway covers core routing features, the full-featured platform is proprietary. Teams that want complete visibility into their infrastructure layer may prefer a fully open-source alternative.

Bifrost by Maxim AI: The Fastest Open-Source LLM Gateway

Bifrost is a high-performance, open-source AI gateway built by Maxim AI, engineered specifically for production-grade AI systems that demand maximum speed, reliability, and governance. Written in Go and licensed under Apache 2.0, Bifrost is designed as infrastructure from day one rather than a developer convenience wrapper.

Performance That Sets New Standards

Bifrost's defining advantage is raw performance. In sustained benchmarks at 5,000 requests per second, the gateway added only 11 µs of overhead per request, making it approximately 50x faster than alternatives like LiteLLM. At the same throughput levels where other gateways begin failing or accumulating minutes of latency, Bifrost maintains a perfect success rate with near-zero queue wait times.

For teams running latency-sensitive applications such as real-time conversational agents, customer support bots, or high-frequency inference pipelines, this performance difference is not marginal. It is structural.

Unified API with Zero-Config Deployment

Bifrost unifies access to 15+ providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, AWS Bedrock, Google Vertex, Azure, Cohere, Mistral, Groq, Ollama, and more) through a single OpenAI-compatible API. Getting started requires no configuration files:

• NPX: npx -y @maximhq/bifrost gets a gateway running in 30 seconds
• Docker: docker run -p 8080:8080 maximhq/bifrost for production-ready deployment

Existing codebases require only a one-line SDK change to route through Bifrost. It works as a drop-in replacement for OpenAI, Anthropic, Google GenAI, LangChain, and Vercel AI SDK with zero code changes beyond updating the base URL.

Production-Grade Reliability and Governance

Bifrost treats failure as a first-class concern with features built for production environments:

• Automatic failover: When a provider fails or returns errors, Bifrost reroutes traffic to fallback providers automatically, ensuring 99.99% uptime without manual intervention.
• Adaptive load balancing: Distributes requests intelligently across multiple API keys and providers based on availability and performance.
• Semantic caching: Reduces costs and latency by caching responses based on semantic similarity rather than exact string matching.
• Governance controls: Set spending limits, track costs across teams and projects, enforce rate limits, and manage fine-grained access control through virtual keys with independent budgets.
• MCP Gateway: Centralize all Model Context Protocol tool connections with unified governance, security, and authentication.

Enterprise Security and Observability

• Vault support: Secure API key management with HashiCorp Vault integration
• SSO integration: Google and GitHub authentication for team access management
• Native observability: Built-in OpenTelemetry support, Prometheus metrics, distributed tracing, and a real-time monitoring dashboard without requiring complex setup or third-party tools

How Bifrost Compares to Portkey

Both tools offer core gateway capabilities like unified APIs, failover, and caching. Where Bifrost pulls ahead is in raw performance, open-source transparency, zero-config deployment, and deep integration with a complete AI quality platform.

The Full-Stack Advantage: Bifrost + Maxim AI

Bifrost is not a standalone tool. It serves as the infrastructure foundation of Maxim AI's end-to-end platform for AI simulation, evaluation, and observability. This integration means teams using Bifrost can seamlessly connect their gateway layer to:

• Experimentation: Test prompts and model configurations in Playground++ before routing production traffic through Bifrost.
• Simulation: Validate agent behavior across hundreds of scenarios and user personas, then deploy with confidence through Bifrost's reliable routing.
• Evaluation: Run comprehensive evaluations on gateway logs using custom, statistical, or LLM-as-a-judge evaluators to measure production quality continuously.
• Observability: Monitor real-time production behavior with distributed tracing, automated quality checks, and custom dashboards that cut across any dimension of agent performance.

This full-stack approach addresses a gap that gateway-only solutions leave open. Instead of stitching together separate tools for routing, monitoring, testing, and evaluation, teams get a unified platform where every stage of the AI lifecycle is connected. Enterprise teams at organizations like Clinc, Thoughtful AI, and Atomicwork use Maxim's complete platform to ship AI agents reliably and more than 5x faster.

Getting Started with Bifrost

Migrating from Portkey or any other gateway to Bifrost takes minutes:

• Install: Run npx -y @maximhq/bifrost or pull the Docker image
• Configure providers: Use the built-in Web UI, API, or file-based configuration to add your model providers
• Update your SDK: Change one line of code in your existing OpenAI, Anthropic, or LangChain integration to point to Bifrost
• Monitor: Access real-time analytics through the built-in dashboard or export metrics via OpenTelemetry

For enterprise teams, Bifrost Enterprise offers 14 days free on your own infrastructure with no commitment, including in-VPC deployments, advanced governance, and dedicated support.

Conclusion

Portkey has been a solid choice for teams entering the AI gateway space. But as GenAI applications scale in complexity, throughput, and organizational scope, teams need infrastructure that delivers both exceptional performance and comprehensive lifecycle coverage. Bifrost by Maxim AI offers the fastest open-source LLM gateway available, backed by a full-stack AI quality platform that connects experimentation, simulation, evaluation, and observability into a single workflow.

Book a demo to see how Bifrost and Maxim AI can accelerate your GenAI infrastructure, or sign up to start building today.