Top MCP Gateways Optimized for Speed and Scale
TL;DR: As MCP adoption grows, so does the operational complexity of managing tool connections at scale. This article covers five MCP gateways - Bifrost, TrueFoundry, Lunar.dev MCPX, Kong AI Gateway, and Docker MCP Gateway evaluated for performance, scalability, and production readiness.
Managing a handful of MCP servers is straightforward. Managing dozens of them across teams, environments, and agent workflows is not. Without a gateway, every agent handles its own connections, credentials, and error recovery which stops scaling fast. MCP gateways solve this by acting as a central control plane between AI agents and their tools.
Here's a look at five gateways worth considering if speed and scale are your primary constraints.
Bifrost
Bifrost is an open-source, high-performance AI gateway built in Go by Maxim AI. It was designed from the ground up for production workloads not retrofitted onto an existing API management platform.
Platform overview
Bifrost sits between your AI agents and LLM providers, routing requests through a single OpenAI-compatible endpoint. It supports 15+ providers including OpenAI, Anthropic, AWS Bedrock, Azure OpenAI, and Google Vertex AI, and can be self-hosted or run via Docker. MCP support is native not bolted on.
Performance and scale
This is where Bifrost separates itself. It adds sub-3ms latency overhead on MCP operations and handles 350+ requests per second on a single vCPU without configuration tuning. That's not a benchmark number to take at face value, but it reflects the architectural choices behind it: asynchronous execution, zero-copy message passing, and in-memory processing that avoids round-trips to external state stores.
For conversational AI applications where agents make dozens or hundreds of tool calls per session, those milliseconds matter. Latency compounds. A gateway that adds 3ms is meaningfully different from one that adds 100ms.
Features
Bifrost ships with semantic caching, automatic failover, load balancing across providers, RBAC, and rate limiting. On the observability side, it exposes Prometheus metrics and supports OpenTelemetry tracing so you can plug it into whatever monitoring stack you're already running. It also supports MCP tool registry, letting agents discover available tools without hardcoded configuration.
Setup is minimal. You can run Bifrost locally with a single npx command or pull the Docker image. No mandatory cloud account, no configuration overhead before you can test it.
Best for
Teams that want raw performance, clean developer experience, and the flexibility of self-hosting. Particularly well-suited for production AI agents where latency is a first-class concern, and for teams already using Maxim AI for evaluation and observability who want the full runtime layer.
TrueFoundry
Platform overview
TrueFoundry is a broader AI infrastructure platform that includes MCP gateway functionality. If you're already managing model deployments and serving through TrueFoundry, the gateway is a natural extension of the same control plane. It's recognized in the 2025 Gartner Market Guide for AI Gateways.
Features
RBAC, secret management, unified management of LLM and tool calls, and support for multiple MCP transports. Latency sits in the 3–4ms range, with similar RPS ceiling to Bifrost.
Best for
Teams that want a single platform managing models, MCP servers, and observability together and are comfortable with the infrastructure commitment that entails.
Lunar.dev MCPX
Platform overview
MCPX is Lunar.dev's MCP gateway, built around enterprise governance and security monitoring rather than pure throughput. It integrates with Lunar's broader AI Gateway for end-to-end traffic inspection.
Features
Granular RBAC at the tool level, comprehensive audit logs, tool scoping and parameter overrides, prompt sanitization, and private deployment/VPC options for sensitive environments. The plugin-based architecture lets organizations add security capabilities incrementally.
Best for
Regulated industries and enterprises where compliance and auditability are non-negotiable, even at the cost of some performance overhead.
Kong AI Gateway
Platform overview
Kong's MCP capabilities arrived with the AI Gateway 3.12 release in October 2025, adding an MCP Proxy plugin, OAuth 2.1 support, and MCP-specific Prometheus metrics to an already-mature API management platform.
Features
Centralized policy enforcement, Prometheus metrics, OAuth 2.1, and integration with Kong Konnect's existing control plane. Strong for teams already routing API traffic through Kong who want to consolidate MCP governance without standing up separate infrastructure.
Best for
Organizations already invested in Kong's platform. Not MCP-native, so greenfield teams will pay for capabilities they may not need. Enterprise licensing can exceed $50k/year.
Docker MCP Gateway
Platform overview
Docker's MCP Gateway applies container orchestration principles to MCP server management. It runs through Docker Desktop, the Docker CLI, and Docker Compose, making it immediately familiar to most engineering teams.
Features
Container-native lifecycle management, request/response filtering, destination allow-lists, secret masking, and horizontal scaling through Docker's native orchestration. Also supports federation across multiple nodes for distributed deployments.
Best for
Docker-native teams that want self-hosted MCP infrastructure with strong container isolation and prefer managing MCP servers the same way they manage everything else through Docker tooling they already know.
How to choose
The right gateway depends on your constraints:
- Latency-sensitive production workloads → Bifrost or TrueFoundry
- Governance-first enterprise deployments → Lunar.dev MCPX
- Already on Kong → Kong AI Gateway
- Docker-native teams wanting self-hosted control → Docker MCP Gateway
The MCP gateway space is still maturing, and most of these platforms added or significantly upgraded MCP support in 2025. Evaluate based on your actual workload run your own benchmarks in staging before committing to any infrastructure decision.
Word count is right around 900. Let me know if you want to swap out any of the other four gateways, tighten a section, or adjust the Bifrost framing.
