Top 5 AI Gateways for Scaling and Managing Your LLM Apps

TL;DR

AI gateways are becoming critical infrastructure for production LLM applications, providing unified access to multiple providers, cost control, and enterprise features. This guide covers the top 5 AI gateways: Bifrost for high-performance production deployments with zero-config setup, LiteLLM for multi-provider abstraction with extensive observability, OpenRouter for model marketplace access across 300+ models, Cloudflare for edge-optimized caching and global distribution, and Kong for enterprise governance and semantic routing capabilities.

Overview > Why You Need an AI Gateway

As LLM applications move from experimentation to production, teams face mounting challenges: managing multiple provider APIs, controlling costs, ensuring reliability, and maintaining security. AI gateways solve these problems by acting as a unified control plane between your applications and LLM providers.

Key benefits:

• Unified API across providers (avoid vendor lock-in)
• Automatic failover and load balancing
• Cost tracking and budget controls
• Request caching to reduce latency and expenses
• Security and compliance guardrails

1. Gateways > Bifrost by Maxim AI

Bifrost > Platform Overview

Bifrost is a high-performance AI gateway built for teams that need production-grade infrastructure without configuration overhead. It provides unified access to 12+ providers through a single OpenAI-compatible API with automatic failover, semantic caching, and enterprise features built in.

Bifrost > Features

Core Infrastructure:

• Unified Interface: Single OpenAI-compatible API for all major providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, AWS Bedrock, Google Vertex, Azure, Cohere, Mistral, Ollama, Groq)
• Automatic Fallbacks: Zero-downtime failover between providers and models with intelligent retry logic
• Load Balancing: Distribute requests across multiple API keys and providers for high availability

Advanced Capabilities:

• Model Context Protocol (MCP): Enable AI models to access external tools like filesystems, web search, and databases
• Semantic Caching: Intelligent response caching based on semantic similarity, reducing costs by up to 90% for common queries
• Multimodal Support: Full support for text, images, audio, and streaming across all providers
• Custom Plugins: Extensible middleware for analytics, monitoring, and custom business logic

Enterprise & Security:

• Budget Management: Hierarchical cost controls with virtual keys, teams, and customer-level budgets
• SSO Integration: Google and GitHub authentication
• Observability: Native Prometheus metrics, distributed tracing, comprehensive logging
• Vault Support: Secure API key management with HashiCorp Vault

Developer Experience:

• Zero-Config Startup: Start in seconds with dynamic provider configuration
• Drop-in Replacement: Replace OpenAI, Anthropic, or other APIs with one line of code
• SDK Integrations: Native support for popular AI frameworks with zero code changes

Bifrost > Best For

Bifrost excels for teams building production AI applications that require high performance, zero configuration overhead, and comprehensive observability. It integrates seamlessly with Maxim's AI evaluation and observability platform, enabling teams to monitor quality metrics, run continuous evaluations, and debug issues across the entire AI lifecycle.

2. Gateways > LiteLLM

LiteLLM > Platform Overview

LiteLLM is an open-source abstraction layer that unifies access to 100+ LLM providers through an OpenAI-compatible interface. Available as both a Python SDK and proxy server, it's widely used by platform engineering teams.

LiteLLM > Features

• Support for 100+ model providers
• Cost tracking and spend management
• Rate limiting and authentication
• Observability integrations (Langfuse, MLflow, Helicone)
• 8ms P95 latency at 1k RPS

3. Gateways > OpenRouter

OpenRouter > Platform Overview

OpenRouter is a unified API gateway providing access to 300+ AI models from 60+ providers through a model marketplace approach. It simplifies switching between models without code changes.

OpenRouter > Features

• Access to 300+ models across major labs
• Automatic fallback routing
• Zero Data Retention (ZDR) mode for privacy
• Response healing for malformed JSON
• Competitive pay-as-you-go pricing

4. Gateways > Cloudflare AI Gateway

Cloudflare AI > Platform Overview

Cloudflare AI Gateway leverages Cloudflare's edge network to provide globally distributed AI request management with caching, rate limiting, and observability built on infrastructure serving 20% of the Internet.

Cloudflare AI > Features

• Edge caching reducing latency by up to 90%
• Rate limiting and request retries
• Dynamic routing and A/B testing
• Integration with Cloudflare Workers AI
• Free tier available on all plans

5. Gateways > Kong AI Gateway

Kong AI > Platform Overview

Kong AI Gateway extends Kong's enterprise API management platform with AI-specific capabilities, including semantic routing, PII sanitization, and automated RAG pipelines.

Kong AI > Features

• Semantic routing across multiple LLMs
• PII sanitization (20+ categories, 12 languages)
• Automated RAG injection to reduce hallucinations
• Token-based throttling for cost control
• MCP and agent workflow support

Comparison Table

Choosing the Right Gateway

Your choice depends on specific requirements:

Choose Bifrost if you need production-ready infrastructure with zero configuration, comprehensive observability, and tight integration with AI evaluation workflows. Teams using Maxim for AI quality management benefit from end-to-end visibility across experimentation, evaluation, and production monitoring.

Choose LiteLLM if you're a platform team building internal LLM infrastructure with extensive provider coverage and need Python SDK integration.

Choose OpenRouter if you prioritize model marketplace access and want flexibility to experiment across 300+ models with minimal provider management.

Choose Cloudflare if you're already on Cloudflare's platform and need edge-optimized caching for global users with minimal latency.

Choose Kong if you're an enterprise with existing Kong deployments requiring advanced governance, semantic features, and compliance controls.

For teams building production AI applications, combining an AI gateway with a comprehensive AI observability and evaluation platform ensures you can monitor quality, debug issues, and iterate quickly across the entire AI lifecycle.

Ready to scale your LLM applications? Get started with Bifrost or explore Maxim's AI evaluation platform to build reliable AI systems faster.