Top 5 Enterprise AI Gateways to Ensure AI Governance and Security

TL;DR: Enterprise AI gateways are the control plane for every LLM call your team makes. They enforce security policies, manage costs, ensure reliability, and give you full observability over AI usage across your organization. This article compares the top 5 platforms: Bifrost, Cloudflare AI Gateway, Vercel AI Gateway, LiteLLM, and Kong AI Gateway.

Why AI Governance Starts at the Gateway

Every time your application calls an LLM, it carries risk. Sensitive data could leak through a prompt. Costs can spiral without guardrails. A provider outage can take your product down. One model returns inconsistent outputs across deployments.

An AI gateway sits between your applications and the LLM providers, acting as the enforcement layer for every request. At the enterprise level, that means centralized access control, cost governance, audit logs, and reliable failover, all without slowing down your engineers.

Here is a quick comparison before we dive in:

1. Bifrost by Maxim AI

Platform Overview

Bifrost is a high-performance, open-source AI gateway built for engineering teams that need enterprise-grade infrastructure without the overhead. It unifies access to 12+ LLM providers, including OpenAI, Anthropic, AWS Bedrock, Google Vertex, Azure, Groq, Mistral, and Ollama, through a single OpenAI-compatible API. You can be up and running in seconds with zero configuration.

What sets Bifrost apart is its deep integration with Maxim AI's evaluation and observability platform. Your gateway traffic flows directly into production monitoring, real-time alerts, and automated quality checks, giving you end-to-end visibility from the request layer to the model output.

Features

Core Infrastructure

• Unified Interface: A single OpenAI-compatible endpoint for all providers with no code changes required. It is a true drop-in replacement for existing SDKs.
• Automatic Fallbacks: Seamless failover across providers and models with zero downtime, so a provider outage never reaches your users.
• Load Balancing: Intelligent request distribution across multiple API keys and providers to avoid rate limit bottlenecks.

Cost and Governance

• Semantic Caching: Caches responses based on semantic similarity, not just exact string matches. This meaningfully reduces redundant LLM calls and cuts costs.
• Budget Management: Hierarchical cost controls using virtual keys, team-level budgets, and per-customer spend limits.
• Governance and Rate Limiting: Fine-grained access control and usage policies at the key, team, or application level.

Security and Enterprise Readiness

• HashiCorp Vault Integration: Secure API key management through Vault, so no plaintext credentials in your environment.
• SSO Support: Google and GitHub authentication out of the box.
• Observability: Native Prometheus metrics, distributed tracing, and comprehensive request logging.
• Custom Plugins: Extensible middleware for analytics, content filtering, custom routing logic, and more.

Advanced Capabilities

• Model Context Protocol (MCP): Let your AI models access external tools like web search, file systems, and databases through the gateway.
• Multimodal Support: Text, images, audio, and streaming, all behind a unified interface.

Best For

Bifrost is the strongest choice for AI engineering teams that need a production-grade gateway with a direct feedback loop into evaluation and observability. If your team is also running evals, simulations, or quality checks on model outputs through Maxim AI, Bifrost makes the entire stack cohesive. It is equally strong for teams that want the control of self-hosting with enterprise features included.

2. Cloudflare AI Gateway

Platform Overview

Cloudflare AI Gateway is a managed AI proxy built into the Cloudflare Developer Platform. It provides visibility and control over your AI API calls without requiring you to change your provider.

Features

• Universal endpoint for routing requests to OpenAI, Anthropic, HuggingFace, Replicate, and others
• Caching and rate limiting to control costs and avoid provider throttling
• Real-time logs and analytics on all AI requests through the Cloudflare dashboard
• Workers AI integration for running inference at the edge

Best For

Teams already on Cloudflare's infrastructure who want zero-friction observability and caching with minimal setup. It is tightly coupled to the Cloudflare ecosystem, which is both its strength and its constraint.

3. Vercel AI Gateway

Platform Overview

Vercel AI Gateway is Vercel's production-ready proxy for accessing 100+ AI models through a single endpoint. It is built for teams using the Vercel platform and the AI SDK.

Features

• Bring-your-own-key authentication with no token markup
• Sub-20ms routing latency with built-in failover across providers
• Native integration with Next.js, AI SDK, and Vercel's deployment pipeline
• Model catalog spanning OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and more

Best For

Frontend and full-stack teams building AI-native applications on Next.js and Vercel who want a low-configuration path to multi-model routing. Less suited for teams that need deep governance or self-hosted infrastructure.

4. LiteLLM

Platform Overview

LiteLLM is a popular open-source Python proxy server that provides an OpenAI-compatible interface to 100+ LLMs. It is widely adopted for its flexibility and active community.

Features

• 100+ model support with a unified API
• Virtual keys and budget tracking per user or team
• Fallbacks, retries, and load balancing built in
• Self-hosted or cloud deployment options
• Prometheus and Langfuse integrations for observability

Best For

Engineering teams that want a self-hosted, open-source gateway with strong community support and flexibility. Well-suited for cost-conscious teams managing multiple models across environments.

5. Kong AI Gateway

Platform Overview

Kong AI Gateway extends Kong's enterprise API gateway with AI-specific plugins, bringing LLM traffic under the same governance layer as your existing APIs.

Features

• AI proxy and routing through Kong's plugin architecture
• Rate limiting and key authentication for LLM endpoints
• Semantic prompt caching on select configurations
• Unified management for both traditional API and AI traffic through Kong Manager

Best For

Enterprises that already run Kong as their API management layer and want to bring LLM governance into the same control plane. The AI capabilities are additive to Kong's existing infrastructure rather than purpose-built for LLM workloads.

Closing Thoughts

Choosing the right AI gateway depends on where your team sits in the AI lifecycle. If you are in early experimentation, Vercel and Cloudflare offer fast, low-friction options. If you need a self-hosted, community-driven solution, LiteLLM delivers solid coverage. For teams with existing API infrastructure, Kong is a natural extension.

For teams building production AI applications where quality, cost governance, and reliability all matter, Bifrost by Maxim AI offers the most complete picture. The gateway layer and the observability layer working together means you are not just routing traffic, you are actively improving the quality of every AI interaction.

You can also pair Bifrost with Maxim's evaluation and simulation platform to go beyond gateway-level monitoring into full pre-release and production quality management.

See how Bifrost works or book a demo to learn how Maxim AI can help your team govern and improve AI at scale.