MarkTechPost Ranks Bifrost, Portkey and LiteLLM Among Nine Top AI Gateways for 2026

MarkTechPost said the market moved fast this year. Palo Alto Networks closed its acquisition of Portkey on May 29, Mintlify acquired Helicone, which now runs in maintenance mode, and LiteLLM survived a PyPI supply chain compromise in March. Those changes mean a gateway choice carries vendor and security risk, not just feature risk, according to the article.

The ranking weighted six criteria for production use: published performance evidence and how it was measured; provider and model coverage behind one OpenAI-compatible API; governance through virtual keys, budgets, RBAC, audit logs and guardrails; deployment options including self-hosted, VPC, air-gapped or managed; cost model including markup, platform fees and free tier limits; and vendor and supply chain risk including license, ownership changes and security history. Coverage figures in its comparison are vendor claims, MarkTechPost said.

Bifrost, from Maxim AI, ranked first. MarkTechPost described it as an open-source AI gateway written in Go that exposes more than 23 providers through one OpenAI-compatible API. It ships under Apache 2.0 and has 8.7K GitHub stars. The article said Bifrost has the strongest published performance numbers among self-hosted gateways: its README reports 11 microseconds of added latency at 5,000 requests per second on a t3.xlarge, and 59 microseconds on a t3.medium. A Maxim benchmark against LiteLLM reported P99 latency of 1.68 seconds versus 90.72 seconds at 500 RPS, according to the ranking. Bifrost includes automatic fallbacks, weighted load balancing and semantic caching, virtual keys with hierarchical budgets and rate limits in the open-source build, MCP gateway support, Code Mode for large tool sets, Prometheus metrics and OpenTelemetry tracing, and drop-in endpoints for OpenAI, Anthropic and Google GenAI SDKs. MarkTechPost said it is best for high-throughput teams that must self-host inside a VPC or air-gapped network.

Portkey ranked second. The article said its AI Gateway is MIT-licensed, has 13K GitHub stars and claims routing to more than 1,600 models, under 1 millisecond latency and a 122 KB footprint. It pairs strong routing with the deepest built-in guardrail catalog, according to the ranking. A Gateway 2.0 pre-release merges Portkey’s enterprise gateway into open source, and Palo Alto Networks now owns Portkey and is folding it into Prisma AIRS. Features include fallbacks, retries, conditional routing, load balancing and request timeouts; simple and semantic caching; input and output guardrails with bring-your-own and partner options; and an MCP Gateway with central authentication, access control and tool-call logging. Braintrust’s comparison lists a free tier with 10K logged requests, with paid plans starting at $49 per month, MarkTechPost said. It is best for teams that want guardrails and routing in one open-source gateway.

LiteLLM ranked third as the most widely adopted open-source LLM gateway. MarkTechPost reported it has 53.8K GitHub stars and supports more than 100 providers, shipping as a Python SDK and a proxy server. The article said its coverage and ecosystem depth are unmatched. It supports chat, embeddings, images, audio, batches, rerank, MCP and A2A endpoints, and reports 8 milliseconds P95 latency at 1K RPS in its own benchmarks. Features include virtual keys, per-team spend tracking, budgets and RPM/TPM limits; a router with retries, fallbacks and load balancing across deployments; an admin UI, guardrails and logging to Langfuse, OpenTelemetry and others; and Terraform modules for AWS and GCP.

Kong AI Gateway ranked fourth, described as open core and deployable self-hosted, in the cloud or in hybrid environments. It handles multi-LLM traffic via plugins and, according to MarkTechPost, is best for API platform teams because it puts LLM, MCP and A2A traffic in one stack. Its published overhead was not disclosed, and entry pricing includes a free trial plus paid plugins. TrueFoundry ranked fifth as a proprietary option available in VPC, on-premises, air-gapped and SaaS deployments, covering more than 1,600 models with under 3 milliseconds internal latency and a free tier of 30K requests per month. Cloudflare AI Gateway ranked sixth as a managed edge offering for major providers and Workers AI; its core features are free, and overhead was not disclosed. Vercel AI Gateway ranked seventh as a managed multi-provider and multimodal service with zero token markup and no disclosed overhead. OpenRouter ranked eighth as a managed service for major labs and open models, with a 5.5% fee on credits and no disclosed overhead. Orq.ai Router ranked ninth as a managed router covering more than 400 models and more than 20 providers, with a free tier and no disclosed overhead.