LLM-powered products are booming, but juggling five different model providers feels like herding caffeinated cats. Gateways tame that chaos. They slot in front of every model, speak one API, and keep your costs, latency, and compliance in check. Below is the 2025 short-list. It’s opinionated, practical, and straight from the corner office.
Table of Contents
- What Makes a Gateway Worth Your Time
- The Quick-Glance Scorecard
- Deep Dives
- BiFrost by Maxim AI
- Helicone Gateway
- Portkey Gateway
- OpenRouter
- LiteLLM
- Cloudflare AI Gateway
- Kong AI Gateway
- Requesty Router
- Unify AI
- Pomerium (Security Overlay)
- Decision Playbook
- Migration Checklist
- Final Word
1. What Makes a Gateway Worth Your Time
Before names and stats, let’s lock on five non-negotiables:
- Unified API: Swap
model=and move on. - Routing + Failover: Models drop. Traffic shouldn’t.
- Cost & Latency Telemetry: See dollars and milliseconds in real time.
- Access Control: Per-team keys, rate caps, audit logs.
- Deployment Flexibility: SaaS, self-host, or both—because lawyers.
A gateway that misses any of those is a side project, not infrastructure.
2. The Quick-Glance Scorecard
| # | Gateway | Best For | Key Edge | Watch-Out |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | BiFrost | Teams scaling fast | 11 µs overhead, open source, zero markup | Still new, smaller community |
| 2 | Helicone | Latency junkies | Rust core, health-aware load-balancing | No pass-through billing |
| 3 | Portkey | Enterprise guardrails | 60+ policy knobs, prompt store | UI depth = learning curve |
| 4 | OpenRouter | Rapid prototyping | 400+ models, SaaS plug-and-play | 5 % markup, no on-prem |
| 5 | LiteLLM | Builder’s playground | 100+ providers, YAML routing | Adds ~50 ms per call |
| 6 | Cloudflare | Edge workloads | Built-in caching, retries | Guardrails basic |
| 7 | Kong | API-heavy orgs | Mature plugin ecosystem | Pricing opaque |
| 8 | Requesty | SLA hawks | 99.99 % uptime, smart caching | Pass-through billing “soon” |
| 9 | Unify AI | Side projects | Simple switcher, pass-through billing | No load-balancing |
| 10 | Pomerium | Security freaks | Identity-aware policy over any gateway | Not a router by itself |
3. Deep Dives
3.1 BiFrost by Maxim AI
Why it’s first on the list
BiFrost is built to haul heavy traffic without blinking. Drop-in OpenAI compatibility, 5k RPS, and a mean latency bump of eleven microseconds. Bring your own provider keys and BiFrost adds zero gateway tax. Need SOC 2? Tick. Need on-prem? Also tick.
Notable tricks
• Latency, cost, and region-aware routing
• OTel hooks out of the box, plus Maxim’s live dashboards
• MCP support for tool orchestration
• One-click deploy in the Maxim console or a docker run
Links to dig into
- Docs: https://getmaxim.ai/docs/bifrost
- Quickstart: https://getmaxim.ai/playground
3.2 Helicone Gateway
Rust makes this one fly—single binary, sub-10 ms overhead, and PeakEWMA load-balancing that sniffs out the fastest model in real time. Paired with Helicone’s observability suite, it’s candy for SREs chasing millisecond budgets.
3.3 Portkey Gateway
Think of Portkey as the policy wonk of the bunch. It ships virtual keys, role-based limits, 60-plus guardrails, and a prompt versioning hub. If compliance asks for an audit trail, Portkey has you covered. Setup is painless; mastering its rule engine takes patience.
3.4 OpenRouter
You spin up an account, grab one key, and boom—400+ models. Great for hackathons and marketing bots. But you’re paying a five-percent toll on every call and there’s no self-host path, so large enterprises often pass.
3.5 LiteLLM
Open-source router with YAML-tunable strategies—latency, cost, least-busy, you name it. It’s flexible and battle-tested in LangChain demos, but each request runs through Python async layers, adding about 50 milliseconds. Fine for moderate traffic, less fine for real-time gaming.
3.6 Cloudflare AI Gateway
Edge caching, global PoPs, auto-retries, and a $0 starting price. Perfect for public APIs that spike worldwide. Security and policy features, though, are thinner than the enterprise crowd demands.
3.7 Kong AI Gateway
If your stack already runs on Kong, the AI plugin means you inherit its governance, plugins, and Terraform recipes. For everyone else, onboarding feels heavyweight, and pricing lives behind a contact form.
3.8 Requesty Router
Requesty chases reliability and cost. It probes provider health every few seconds and flips traffic in under 50 ms. Cross-provider caching and per-key spend caps slash token bills. Pass-through billing is on the roadmap, not today.
3.9 Unify AI
The minimal-viable router. One endpoint, pass-through pricing, dead-simple config. But it lacks load-balancing and deep analytics, so treat it as a starter kit.
3.10 Pomerium (Security Overlay)
Not a gateway in the routing sense. Pomerium sits in front of other gateways to enforce identity-aware policies. Need SSO, short-lived session keys, or zero-trust zoning? Bolt this on and sleep better.
4. Decision Playbook
| Need | Pick |
|---|---|
| Sub-second latency at scale | Helicone or BiFrost |
| Open-source + enterprise security | BiFrost, Portkey, LiteLLM |
| Zero-ops SaaS | OpenRouter, Cloudflare |
| Existing Kong mesh | Kong AI Gateway |
| Hardcore guardrails | Portkey |
| Strict SLA & cost guard | Requesty + Pomerium combo |
5. Migration Checklist
- Inventory your current model calls, keys, and monthly spend.
- Sandbox a gateway: mirror prod traffic and compare latencies.
-
Flip staging by swapping the
base_urlin your OpenAI client. - Set alerts for spend, error rate, and p95 latency.
- Gradual rollout: 10 %, 25 %, 50 %, then 100 %.
- Post-mortem week one: track cost delta and incident count.
You’ll either celebrate or roll back. Both beats blind hope.
6. Final Word
Gateways are the load balancers of the AI decade. Skip them and you’ll drown in provider quirks, surprise bills, and 500s at 3 am. Pick one aligned with your latency target, security posture, and budget ceiling.
If you want open-source speed with enterprise armor, BiFrost is the call. Fire it up, point your SDKs at a single endpoint, and focus on shipping features, not chasing tokens.
Now get back to building. The models won’t route themselves.
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