AI Gateway

An AI gateway routes each request to the right model and provider through one API. This guide compares five AI gateways for multi-model routing, including Bifrost, OpenRouter, and LiteLLM, on routing rules, failover, overhead, and deployment control.

Claude Code usage limits run on a five-hour session clock and a weekly clock, and API access adds organization-wide rate limits. This guide explains both, and how Bifrost enforces team budgets, key rotation, and provider fallback from one endpoint.

An LLM router decides which model and provider serves each request, based on rules, prompt complexity, budget, or provider health. This guide covers how model routing works, the main routing strategies, and how an LLM router differs from an AI gateway.

Kong adds AI plugins to a general-purpose API proxy, which fits teams already running Kong. This guide compares five alternatives on AI-native design, published overhead, MCP support, governance, and deployment model.

A comparison of the five best AI gateways in 2026: Bifrost, Cloudflare, Vercel, LiteLLM, and OpenRouter. Includes published performance figures, deployment and licence details, selection criteria, and a decision map for picking between self-hosted and managed options.

Kong AI Gateway assembles LLM features from plugins on a general-purpose API gateway and manages them through a hosted control plane. This guide ranks five Kong alternatives for teams that need self-hosted or air-gapped deployment, a native MCP gateway, and per-key governance, with Bifrost first.