Awesome AI Gateway [](https://awesome.re)

Pick the right AI gateway for your need in ~10 seconds — then trust the answer. A decision tree, a reproducible cost benchmark, and independent evidence for what we exclude. Organized by what you actually need, not by vendor.

Built the hard way: I burned $788 on AI coding in a single day — one flagship model ate 78% of it, just because I'd defaulted everything to the priciest option. So I mapped the whole gateway landscape. → the story

Languages: English · 简体中文

  🧭 Pick a gateway       🚀 Live interactive site       📊 Cost & scorecard  

Contents

• 🔥 Top gateways (by stars)
• Browse by need
  • 💰 Cost-first — cheapest multi-model access · 🆓 free tiers that still work
  • 🔓 Self-hosted open source
  • 🏢 Enterprise & compliance
  • ☁️ First-party gateways (cloud & model vendors)
  • 🇨🇳 China ecosystem
  • 🤖 MCP & agent gateways
  • 🔧 More by capability — routing · caching · observability · K8s
• Decide & compare
  • Which gateway should I use · Quick comparison · The requirements map
  • How to choose safely — data-retention matrix · relay watch-list
• Signal & reference
  • 📊 Latest evaluations · 📰 What's new · 🚀 Recent releases
  • ⚡ 10-second answers · 📚 Essential reading · Guides & comparisons
  • FAQ · Glossary · Why this exists · 🔌 Use the data

🔥 Top gateways (by stars)

The most-starred, most-authoritative projects in the list — a fast orientation. Stars auto-refresh daily; full context (features, license, caveats) is in each linked section. ⚠️ flags a project whose coding-subscription / account-pool routing can carry provider-ToS or account-ban risk.

Hosted leaders (SaaS, no GitHub stars): OpenRouter (400+ models, ~5.5% fee) · Vercel AI Gateway & Cloudflare AI Gateway (0% markup) → Cost-first.

Stars measure popularity, not fitness for your need — that's what the category sections and the evidence-based scorecard are for.

💰 Cost-first: cheapest multi-model access

Pain point: "I want many models for the least money and zero ops."

• OpenRouter — The dominant model marketplace: 400+ models behind one OpenAI-compatible API, pay-as-you-go with automatic failover; ~5.5% fee when buying credits. $113M Series B (May 2026), ~8M users.
• Vercel AI Gateway — Hundreds of models at provider list price (0% markup), $5/month free credits, zero-data-retention option; pairs naturally with the AI SDK.
• Cloudflare AI Gateway — Free control plane in front of your own provider keys: caching, dynamic routing, unified billing, and dollar-denominated spend limits (2026 beta).
• Requesty — EU-friendly OpenRouter alternative: 400+ models, sub-20ms failover, ~5% markup.
• Eden AI — Unified API for 500+ models plus vision/OCR/speech; EU-based, ~5.5% platform fee.
• Helicone AI Gateway (cloud) — Passthrough billing at 0% markup with observability bundled.
• GPT-Load ⭐ 6.2k — High-performance Go proxy that rotates pools of API keys across channels to maximize quota usage.
• Loop Gateway — OpenAI-compatible proxy that meters every request in Bitcoin sats instead of dollars. 311 models via OpenRouter at a 15% markup. No accounts, no email, no card; top up over Lightning, get a bearer token. Three auth rails (prepaid bearer, L402, Cashu). Hosted at api.loopxxi.com. New & unverified (anonymous; its public GitHub repo has since been removed, so treat it as a closed hosted relay) — it resells frontier models through the operator's own OpenRouter account at a 15% markup, and account-less + crypto-prepaid means no recourse if it swaps models or vanishes; confirm fidelity with canary_check.py and only top up what you can afford to lose.
• nullsink (repo) — Account-less, metered proxy for frontier-model APIs, paid in Monero or Bitcoin. No accounts, no email, no card; mint a bearer token, prepay on-chain, and point the official SDKs at one base URL. ~10% markup taken once at top-up; no IP logging, no request logs; payment and token kept unlinkable. Self-hostable single binary (TypeScript/Bun, AGPL-3.0), live at nullsink.is. New & unverified (repo created 2026-06, 4★) — account-less + crypto-prepaid + no logs means no recourse if it swaps models or vanishes; confirm fidelity with canary_check.py and only top up what you can afford to lose.
• AIMLAPI — One OpenAI/Anthropic-compatible endpoint fronting 400+ models (chat, image, video, audio, embeddings); prepaid, OpenRouter-style aggregator.
• KeepRouter — OpenAI- and Anthropic-compatible gateway: one key fronts 50+ models (Claude, GPT, Gemini, Mistral, Qwen, Kimi, GLM, DeepSeek, MiMo, MiniMax). Native /v1/messages means it works with Claude Code and the Anthropic SDK, not just the OpenAI SDK. Prepaid pay-as-you-go, billed at cost with 0% token markup (top-up fee 8%+$0.35); one genuinely free $0 model plus trial credit for new accounts. Bilingual EN/简体中文, Merchant of Record Paddle; not available in mainland China. New & unverified — confirm fidelity with canary_check.py before relying on it in production.
• AI快站 (aifast.club) — OpenAI- and Anthropic-compatible relay optimized for mainland China: 572 models across 16+ providers (Claude Sonnet 5, GPT-5.5, Gemini 3, DeepSeek V4, Qwen 3, Kimi, GLM-5.2, MiniMax, Grok, Flux, Stable Diffusion, ElevenLabs) behind one key with Alipay/WeChat top-up and Hong Kong/Singapore edge nodes for sub-100ms mainland latency. Cursor / Claude Code / Codex / OpenClaw / Dify integration docs. New & unverified — confirm fidelity with canary_check.py before relying on it in production.
• Novita AI — Unified API to 200+ open-source models (DeepSeek/Qwen/Llama…) with load balancing, autoscaling and failover; also a GPU cloud.
• FlintAPI (repo) — Hosted OpenAI-compatible gateway aggregating 25+ Chinese LLMs (DeepSeek, Qwen, Kimi, GLM, MiniMax) with $2 free credits. New and unverified — confirm model fidelity (e.g. with canary_check.py) before relying on it in production.
• FlowBar — Hosted OpenAI-compatible relay reselling dozens of models (GPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek, Qwen, GLM, Kimi) below OpenRouter, with USD/CNY/crypto payment. New and unverified — confirm model fidelity (e.g. with canary_check.py) before relying on it in production.
• Meshs One — Hosted OpenAI-compatible relay fronting Chinese frontier models (DeepSeek-V4, Qwen3.7-Max, MiniMax-M3) under one key, per-token pay-as-you-go (its /v1 endpoint returns a new_api_error, so it appears to run on new-api). New & unverified — closed-source and brand-new; confirm model fidelity (e.g. with canary_check.py) before relying on it in production.
• CoderPlan — Hosted OpenAI-compatible relay fronting Claude/GPT/Gemini/DeepSeek/Grok for the China market, per-token pay-as-you-go, ¥10 minimum top-up with Alipay/WeChat; Hong Kong/Singapore nodes (API base api.coderplan.ai/v1, which returns a new_api_error, so it appears to run on new-api). New and unverified — confirm model fidelity (e.g. with canary_check.py) before relying on it in production.
• lxg2it ModelRouter (repo) — Solo-built, OpenAI-compatible router over 7+ providers (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Cerebras, Groq, Grok, GLM) with tiered automatic fallback that selects the cheapest available model. Free tier plus a paid tier advertised at 0% markup on Anthropic (a deposit fee may apply — verify current pricing). New and unverified — the public repo is a thin, unlicensed core stub still seeing fresh commits (routing logic lives in the closed hosted service; no license file) — confirm model fidelity (e.g. with canary_check.py) before relying on it in production.
• OpenPaths (repo) — Hosted OpenAI-compatible router auto-routing across 15+ providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Groq, xAI, DeepSeek, Mistral) under one API, spanning chat, image, video, music, speech, embeddings and transcription. New & unverified — despite the "open source" framing the GitHub repo is a no-code, unlicensed marketing mirror (canonical code lives on the third-party Codex Infinity platform and is agent-maintained), so treat it as a closed hosted relay and confirm model fidelity (e.g. with canary_check.py) before relying on it in production.
• Glama Gateway — OpenAI-compatible gateway to 100+ models with consolidated billing, caching and logging (OSS core glama-ai/lightport).
• RouterPlex — Hosted OpenAI-compatible gateway to 25+ models (GPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek, Qwen, Kimi and others) across 11 providers; prepaid, billed per token at published vendor list rates, no subscription. $5 free credit for new accounts. New and unverified, closed-source — confirm model fidelity (e.g. with canary_check.py) before relying on it in production.
• TierUp — Hosted OpenAI-compatible gateway exposing four fixed performance tiers (tier-1…tier-4) instead of model names, each mapped server-side to a current best-value model; routes through OpenRouter and prices ~50% under the underlying models' retail, transparently subsidized during an early product-market-fit phase (solo-built, ~zero production users, tier 1 currently free). New & unverified — confirm model fidelity (e.g. with canary_check.py) before relying on it in production.

💡 Squeeze more from any gateway: enable semantic caching (Kong, Bifrost, Zuplo), set spend limits (Cloudflare, Zuplo, Pydantic/Logfire), and route easy prompts to cheap models (see Smart routing).

🆓 Free tiers that still work — the verified-limits table

One of the most-asked questions in the ecosystem, and the internet's answers are mostly stale. Every row below was re-verified against the provider's own docs (machine-readable, verified 2026-07-09, CI-enforced ≤30-day re-review). "Unpublished" means the provider now hides the numbers behind a login — we say so instead of quoting third-hand figures.

Trial credits ≠ free tiers (they expire): NVIDIA build.nvidia.com (1,000 requests at signup, +4,000 with a business email — staff-forum figures; prototyping-only license) and Alibaba Cloud Model Studio international (per-model quotas, hard 90-day expiry, Singapore region). Recently discontinued — ignore stale listicles: Together AI killed its -free models (now $5 minimum prepaid, "does not currently offer free trials"), Moonshot/Kimi requires a $1 top-up to start, and xAI's much-cited data-sharing credits are no longer documented on any public page. Full evidence per row: data/free_tiers.json. A wrong row is a bug — report it.

🔓 Self-hosted open source

Pain point: "My keys, my infra, no per-token middleman fee."

• LiteLLM ⭐ 53.3k — The default choice: Python SDK + proxy server speaking OpenAI format to 100+ providers, with virtual keys, budgets, load balancing and guardrails.
• Portkey Gateway ⭐ 12.4k — Fast TypeScript gateway (1,600+ models, 50+ guardrails) that also powers Portkey's commercial LLMOps platform.
• CLIProxyAPI ⭐ 40.1k — Go gateway that wraps coding-agent CLI subscriptions (Claude Code, Codex, Gemini, Grok, Antigravity) into OpenAI/Gemini/Claude/Codex-compatible APIs with multi-account pools, round-robin load balancing and a management API; one of the highest-starred OSS gateways in the space. BYO accounts — but routing OAuth coding-tier subscriptions through an API can violate provider ToS, so weigh account-ban risk.
• 9router ⭐ 21.8k — MIT self-hosted BYOK local proxy that auto-routes across 40+ providers with subscription→cheap→free fallback, multi-account load balancing and token compression; cost-first and very popular, but its free/OAuth coding-tier routing (Claude Code, Codex, Kiro) carries provider-ToS/account-ban risk.
• OmniRoute ⭐ 15.8k — MIT self-hosted TypeScript gateway: one endpoint to 231+ providers (50+ free), plugging Claude Code / Codex / Cursor / Cline / Copilot into free Claude/GPT/Gemini with stacked token compression (15–95% savings), 17 routing strategies, smart auto-fallback and MCP/A2A. A 2026 breakout of the coding-agent "token-saver" wave — genuine code (not a relay farm), but its free/OAuth coding-tier routing carries provider-ToS/account-ban risk.
• Chat Nio (CoAI) ⭐ 9.2k — Multi-tenant "one-stop" gateway with a built-in admin + credit/subscription billing panel over 200+ models / 35+ providers, priority-based load balancing and model caching — the same commercial-panel genre as the new-api / one-api / VoAPI entries here.
• TensorZero ⭐ 11.7k — ⚠️ Archived June 2026 (company wound down; repo read-only, Apache-2.0 code + community forks remain). Rust gateway unified with observability, evals, experimentation and optimization.
• Bifrost ⭐ 6.4k — Go gateway from Maxim AI claiming ~50x LiteLLM throughput; adaptive load balancing, cluster mode, MCP support.
• Traceloop Hub ⭐ 218 — High-scale gateway written in Rust from the Traceloop team (OpenLLMetry / OTel-for-LLMs); OpenTelemetry-native observability built in.
• Helicone ⭐ 5.9k — Observability-first platform (YC W23) with a Rust ai-gateway ⭐ 612.
• Plano ⭐ 6.7k — AI-native proxy and data plane for agents (formerly Arch Gateway / archgw).
• AxonHub ⭐ 4.7k — Go gateway: call 100+ LLMs from any SDK behind one OpenAI/Anthropic-compatible endpoint, with built-in failover, load balancing, cost control and end-to-end tracing. BYOK self-hosted.
• Manifest ⭐ 7.2k — Self-hosted TypeScript router (MIT): one OpenAI-compatible /auto endpoint (plus /v1/messages for Anthropic clients) over 300+ models / 31+ providers, mixing API keys, local models (Ollama/LM Studio) and coding-tier subscriptions with complexity/header-based routing, cost tracking, budgets and failover. BYO accounts — routing OAuth coding-tier subscriptions through an API can carry provider-ToS risk.
• LLM Gateway ⭐ 1.4k — Open-source OpenRouter alternative: route, manage and analyze requests across providers.
• APIPark ⭐ 1.8k — Cloud-native LLM API management and distribution platform.
• Pydantic AI Gateway ⭐ 192 — BYOK gateway with cost caps and OTel; ⚠️ repo archived, now folded into Pydantic Logfire.
• OptiLLM ⭐ 4.2k — Optimizing inference proxy that boosts accuracy via test-time compute techniques.
• aisuite ⭐ 14.9k — Andrew Ng's unified multi-provider client. A library rather than a deployable proxy — fits when you don't want network hops.
• Shepherd Model Gateway (SMG) ⭐ 386 — Engine-agnostic gateway in Rust: one OpenAI/Anthropic-compatible endpoint over vLLM/SGLang/TRT-LLM + cloud providers, with KV-cache-aware routing and WASM plugins.
• RelayPlane ⭐ 189 — MIT, local-first proxy (npm): 11 providers behind one endpoint with per-request cost attribution and hard daily/hourly budget caps.
• SentryNode Gateway ⭐ 0 — Open-core (Apache-2.0) AI proxy for cost governance / FinOps routing: adaptive model routing, budget caps and audit logging. Early-stage; the public repo currently ships a demo scaffold.
• GoModel ⭐ 992 — Lightweight single-binary Go gateway (open-source LiteLLM alternative) exposing one OpenAI/Anthropic-compatible API across 18+ providers with caching, guardrails and usage/cost tracking; fast-growing, though its throughput-vs-LiteLLM figures are vendor-run.
• OpenGateLLM ⭐ 168 — Production-grade open-source GenAI gateway from France's Etalab (powers the government's "Albert" assistant): one OpenAI-compatible API over self-hosted + provider models, with auth, rate limits and usage tracking. Distinct public-sector / EU-sovereignty angle.
• ⚠️ Stale but historically notable: BricksLLM ⭐ 1.2k (PII masking, per-key limits; inactive since early 2025), Glide ⭐ 160 (inactive since 2024).

🏢 Enterprise & compliance

Pain point: "Audit logs, PII redaction, RBAC, on-prem, and the EU AI Act (enforceable Aug 2026)."

• Kong AI Gateway ⭐ 43.8k — Mature API gateway with AI plugins: semantic caching/routing, prompt guard, token rate-limiting; Konnect for managed control plane.
• Apache APISIX ⭐ 16.9k — Cloud-native API + AI gateway with ai-proxy / ai-proxy-multi plugins.
• Envoy AI Gateway ⭐ 1.8k — CNCF-aligned GenAI access on Envoy Gateway, backed by Tetrate and Bloomberg.
• kgateway ⭐ 5.6k — CNCF API/AI gateway, the base of Solo.io's commercial Gloo AI Gateway.
• TrueFoundry AI Gateway — Enterprise gateway with routing, guardrails and RBAC, deployable into your K8s/VPC.
• nexos.ai — Enterprise AI gateway/orchestration from the Nord Security founders (€30M Series A, Oct 2025).
• Tyk AI Studio — AI governance suite: budgets, model catalogs, guardrails on Tyk's gateway.
• Gravitee Agent Mesh — LLM Proxy, MCP Proxy and A2A support inside Gravitee APIM.
• WSO2 AI Gateway — Egress management for LLM traffic: model routing, semantic caching, guardrails.
• F5 AI Gateway — Containerized AI traffic gateway; data-leakage detection via the LeakSignal acquisition (announced Jul 2025).
• IBM API Connect AI Gateway — Policy enforcement, masking and audit for LLM traffic.
• MuleSoft AI / Omni Gateway — Governs LLM, MCP and agent traffic alongside classic APIs.
• Lunar.dev ⭐ 468 — Egress consumption gateway repositioned around MCP/agent governance.
• KrakenD AI Gateway — High-performance, stateless Go API gateway (krakend/krakend-ce ⭐ 2.6k) with an AI proxy + prompt-security layer.
• Broadcom Layer7 AI Gateway — LLM traffic governance, threat protection and quotas on the mature Layer7 API platform.
• Cequence AI Gateway — API-security-first AI gateway: discovery, guardrails and threat protection for LLM/agent traffic.
• Axway Amplify AI Gateway — Centralized control plane on Axway's Amplify platform governing LLM/MCP/agent traffic with business-logic model routing, RBAC, spend caps, prompt-injection controls and RAG integration, from a 10× Gartner MQ API-management Leader.
• Red Hat Connectivity Link — Kubernetes-native gateway (built on the Kuadrant project, successor to 3scale) unifying AI gateway, API management and multicluster connectivity; powers OpenShift AI Models-as-a-Service as the front door governing external and self-hosted LLM endpoints.
• Sensedia AI Gateway — Gartner-recognized APIM vendor's agnostic AI gateway governing LLMs, MCP servers and AI agents with multi-model routing, guardrails, cost controls and observability across a multi-cloud control plane.
• Ambassador Edge Stack — Envoy-based, Kubernetes-native API gateway (OSS core emissary-ingress ⭐ 4.5k) whose AI Gateway layer adds LLM-provider routing, token rate-limiting and fallback — a peer to Kong/Tyk/APISIX in the API-vendor cohort.

☁️ First-party gateways (cloud & model vendors)

Pain point: "We're already committed to one cloud — give us the native path."

• AWS Bedrock — Multi-model access via the unified Converse API, cross-region inference, and AgentCore Gateway for tools/MCP.
• Azure API Management — GenAI gateway — Token limits, semantic caching and load balancing in front of Azure OpenAI / AI Foundry.
• Google Apigee + Vertex AI — LLM gateway patterns on Apigee with Vertex Model Garden as the managed hub.
• Cloudflare AI Gateway — See Cost-first; the strongest free first-party option.
• Vercel AI Gateway — GA, 0% markup, ZDR option; the default for Next.js/AI SDK shops.
• Databricks Unity AI Gateway — Mosaic AI Gateway folded into Unity Catalog, adding agent + MCP governance.
• Tencent Cloud AI Gateway — Tencent's first-party cloud-native intelligent gateway bundling LLM + MCP + Agent gateways with protocol conversion, cost/performance-based routing, and unified access to Hunyuan + third-party models.

🇨🇳 China ecosystem

Pain point: "Domestic models (Qwen/DeepSeek/GLM/Kimi), CNY payment, key distribution & billing for teams."

• new-api ⭐ 41.9k — The most active one-api fork, now a "unified AI model hub": protocol conversion, billing, Rerank/Realtime endpoints. AGPL-3.0.
• one-api ⭐ 35.6k — The original LLM API management & distribution system (OpenAI/Azure/Claude/Gemini/DeepSeek/Doubao…); development has slowed.
• Higress ⭐ 8.8k — Alibaba's AI-native gateway on Envoy/Istio, first-class Tongyi/DeepSeek support; hosted version at higress.ai.
• GPT-Load ⭐ 6.2k — Smart API-key rotation multi-channel proxy in Go.
• one-hub ⭐ 2.9k — one-api fork with better non-OpenAI function calling and stats.
• simple-one-api ⭐ 2.3k — Single binary adapting Qianfan/Spark/Hunyuan/MiniMax/DeepSeek to the OpenAI interface.
• Octopus ⭐ 2.3k — Personal LLM API aggregation gateway unifying multiple providers behind one endpoint, with load balancing and OpenAI/Anthropic protocol conversion (Go + Next.js).
• Veloera ⭐ 1.6k — Newer relay platform in the one-api/new-api lineage.
• uni-api ⭐ 1.2k — Lightweight single-config unified API manager, no frontend.
• APIPark ⭐ 1.8k — China-origin, cloud-native AI & API gateway with an open developer portal.
• VoAPI ⭐ 1.1k — Polished new-api-lineage relay/billing panel (Go), focused on UI and operations.
• done-hub ⭐ 789 — one-api/new-api fork with richer billing and channel management.
• sub2api ⭐ 31.5k — Go relay platform that pools Claude/OpenAI/Gemini/Antigravity subscription accounts (OAuth, session keys, API keys) behind one OpenAI/Anthropic-compatible endpoint, adding cost-sharing "carpool" billing (Stripe/Alipay/WeChat), key distribution and per-token rate limits. One of 2026's fastest-rising China-ecosystem relays — but account-pooling sits adjacent to the resold-relay category this list excludes; BYO accounts and vet before use.
• AI Proxy ⭐ 504 — Self-hosted Go gateway from the Sealos team that accepts OpenAI/Claude/Gemini protocols, converts between them, and adds multi-channel routing, load balancing, rate limiting, multi-tenant isolation, and a caching/web-search/reasoning plugin layer.
• metapi ⭐ 3.1k — Self-hosted "router of routers": aggregates your accounts across new-api/one-api/OneHub/DoneHub/Veloera/AnyRouter/sub2api into one key, with cost/balance/utilization-weighted smart routing, channel cool-down/retry, model auto-discovery and OpenAI⇄Claude conversion (TypeScript, MIT). Routing software only — vet the upstream relays it points at.
• Volcengine AI Gateway — ByteDance's cloud AI gateway: unified access, routing and governance for Doubao + third-party models.

⚠️ This list deliberately excludes reverse-engineered / resold "free-api" relays — and not on principle alone. Two 2026 measurement studies found systematic fraud across the relay population: Real Money, Fake Models measured model-identity failures in 45.8% of fingerprint tests and output divergence up to 47%; Your Agent Is Mine caught routers injecting malicious code and exfiltrating planted API keys. If you're forced to vet one anyway, use the canary-diff test in How to choose safely.

🤖 MCP & agent gateways

Pain point: "Agents call tools now — govern MCP traffic like you govern APIs." The newest category (2025–2026).

• agentgateway ⭐ 3.8k — CNCF proxy for agentic traffic: MCP governance and agent-to-agent (A2A) communication.
• Lunar.dev MCPX ⭐ 468 — Gateway for managing MCP server consumption.
• Tetrate Agent Router Service — Managed Envoy AI Gateway fleet: LLM + MCP gateway with guardrails (~5% fee).
• Zuplo AI Gateway — Programmable policies: USD spend limits, prompt-injection detection, secret masking, MCP support.
• NetFoundry MCP/LLM Gateways — Zero-trust gateways for AI deployments (launched June 2026).
• AWS AgentCore Gateway — Tool/MCP gateway inside Bedrock AgentCore.
• IBM ContextForge ⭐ 4.1k — MCP gateway/registry federating many MCP servers behind one endpoint with auth, rate limits and observability.
• Docker MCP Gateway ⭐ 1.5k — Docker-maintained docker mcp CLI plugin that runs and federates MCP servers as containers behind one endpoint, with secret management, call interception and per-tool access control.
• MetaMCP ⭐ 2.5k — Aggregates MCP servers into one endpoint with middleware (auth, filtering) and a management UI.
• ToolHive ⭐ 1.9k — Go platform that runs MCP servers in isolated containers and fronts them with a unified, secured gateway (access policies, "virtual MCP" aggregation).
• Microsoft MCP Gateway ⭐ 738 — Microsoft-maintained reverse proxy + management layer for MCP servers: session-aware stateful routing and lifecycle management on Kubernetes.
• 1MCP ⭐ 471 — Unified MCP server (TypeScript) aggregating many MCP servers behind one endpoint, with HTTP access and CLI-based discovery for agents.
• mcpproxy-go ⭐ 285 — Local Go MCP proxy that federates multiple MCP servers behind one endpoint, with BM25 tool-search filtering, token reduction, and auto-quarantine/security scanning of new servers.
• MCPJungle ⭐ 1.1k — Self-hosted MCP registry + gateway for central tool governance in enterprises.
• Obot ⭐ 883 — Open-source agent platform with an MCP gateway for governing tool access.
• Director ⭐ 480 — Middleware to run, secure and observe MCP servers behind one connection.
• Lasso MCP Gateway ⭐ 378 — Security-first MCP gateway: plugin guardrails, secret masking, threat detection.
• Armorer Guard ⭐ 40 — Local Rust MCP proxy that wraps stdio servers and inspects tool-call arguments for prompt injection, credential leakage, exfiltration, and risky actions.
• fak ⭐ 12 — Security-first agent/MCP firewall: a single dependency-free Go binary (Apache-2.0) fronting any OpenAI/Anthropic/MCP backend, where a default-deny capability allow-list adjudicates every tool call and suspicious tool results are quarantined out of the model's context, plus bearer/x-api-key auth, an X-Trace-Id audit trail and Prometheus /metrics. New and early-stage.
• Archestra ⭐ 4k — Kubernetes-native MCP gateway with OAuth On-Behalf-Of user-delegated tool access, an A2A agent-to-agent gateway, and deterministic dual-LLM / "lethal trifecta" guardrails plus per-environment egress and cost limits, built for enterprise agent deployments ($13.5M funding).
• Unla ⭐ 2.2k — Lightweight Go MCP gateway that turns existing REST/gRPC APIs and MCP servers into standardized MCP endpoints with zero code changes, behind one gateway with multi-tenant sessions, OAuth, hot-reload config and a management UI.
• Jarvis Registry ⭐ 2k — Enterprise MCP/agent gateway fronting internal tools behind one authenticated MCP-over-SSE/HTTP endpoint with OAuth2/OIDC identity (Keycloak/Cognito/Entra), tool-level RBAC/ACL, agent orchestration, and OpenTelemetry/Prometheus observability.
• MCP Gateway & Registry ⭐ 786 — Enterprise MCP gateway + registry centralizing access to many MCP servers behind one OAuth-protected endpoint, with virtual MCP servers, semantic tool discovery, A2A agent discovery and fine-grained governance/audit; AWS-aligned.
• Nexus (Grafbase) ⭐ 436 — Rust AI router from Grafbase that aggregates MCP servers (STDIO/SSE/HTTP) and LLM providers behind one endpoint with context-aware fuzzy tool search, OAuth2/TLS security, rate limiting and OpenTelemetry.
• Pomerium ⭐ 4.9k — Identity-aware access proxy with MCP support: policy-based auth in front of MCP servers.

🔧 More by capability (cross-cutting)

These cut across the need-based sections above — routing intelligence, observability, and Kubernetes infra that complement whichever gateway you picked.

🧠 Smart routing & model selection

Pain point: "Send each prompt to the cheapest model that can handle it."

⚠️ The most common gateway failure isn't routing — it's translation. Across 2025–26 issue trackers, the single largest bug category on every major gateway is corrupted tool-call / thinking-block / streaming translation: Portkey's most-commented issue (#980, tool_use ids lost), OpenRouter's AI-SDK thinking-mode breakage (filed three times: #245), Claude Code erroring through LiteLLM (#13373) and new-api (#1854) — "claude code" appears in 413 LiteLLM issues since 2025. "OpenAI-compatible" is a spectrum, not a checkbox (LangChain's own compat issue). Before committing: run your actual agent (tool calls + streaming + thinking) through the gateway, not just a hello-world completion.

• Not Diamond — SOTA model-routing intelligence; powers OpenRouter's Auto router.
• Martian — Pioneer commercial model router; Accenture partnership.
• Inworld Router — One API for 200+ models with real-time complexity-based routing and 0% markup (pass-through pricing); adds first-party realtime inference for open models. Research preview.
• RouteLLM ⭐ 5.2k — LMSYS's open router framework (research-grade; inactive since 2024 but still the canonical paper/code).
• OpenRouter Auto — One model id (openrouter/auto) that routes per-prompt.
• Unify — Early neural LLM router (company since pivoted to agents).
• Bifrost adaptive load balancing / Cloudflare dynamic routing — routing built into gateways themselves.
• Claude Code Router ⭐ 35.7k — Route Claude Code (and other agent CLIs) to any model/provider — DeepSeek, Qwen, local — by request type.
• ClawRouter ⭐ 6.6k — Agent-native LLM router (TypeScript) with local sub-ms routing across 41+ models, built so autonomous agents can pay per call via x402/USDC with no signup or API key. The routing client is open-source — but its account-less hosted access (8 free models + crypto pay-per-use) is resold access: verify model fidelity with canary_check.py and prefer your own keys in production.
• workweave/router ⭐ 838 — Go router for agentic systems: routes each prompt to the right model in <50ms behind one OpenAI-compatible endpoint, pitched as a drop-in endpoint swap that cuts 40–70% of cost.
• UncommonRoute ⭐ 679 — MIT drop-in OpenAI proxy that routes by prompt difficulty; markets hard numbers (≈82% cost savings, 79.4% accuracy, 93.4% pass rate) and integrates with Claude Code / Cursor / Codex.
• OrcaRouter Lite ⭐ 511 — MIT self-hosted single-workspace router (BYOK, OpenAI-compatible) from Continuum AI with a managed hosted upgrade path; ranks at/near the top of the RouterArena leaderboard.
• RouterArena ⭐ 108 — Open evaluation framework + live leaderboard for LLM routers (standardized datasets, cost/quality metrics) — pick a router on data, in the spirit of this list's benchmarks.
• vLLM Semantic Router ⭐ 4.9k — Mixture-of-models router that picks a model per prompt by intent/complexity; a vLLM project.
• NVIDIA LLM Router ⭐ 320 — NIM-based blueprint routing each prompt to the best model by task and complexity.
• LLMRouter ⭐ 2.1k — Research framework for graph/learned cost–quality model routing.
• Orq.ai — Hosted routing control plane: 500+ models across 30+ providers with retries, fallbacks, caching and governance (BYOK).
• NadirClaw ⭐ 575 — Self-hosted, OpenAI-compatible router (Python) that sends simple prompts to cheap/local models and hard ones to premium, with a trained cascade verifier to cut API cost 40–70%.
• ngrok AI Gateway — Managed proxy routing to OpenAI/Anthropic/Google + local Ollama/vLLM/LM Studio, with automatic failover, key rotation, and CEL traffic-policy controls (PII redaction).

💾 Prompt caching through a gateway — the money question

Pain point: "Anthropic/OpenAI sell 75–90% cache discounts — do I still get them through a router?"

Often no, and the failure is silent. This is one of the most-asked, worst-answered questions in the ecosystem — real users repeatedly discover their cache discount vanished in transit: native_tokens_cached stuck at 0 through OpenRouter in Zed (zed#52576), the OpenRouter AI-SDK provider shipping broken cache options (ai-sdk-provider#35), and a long tail of "caching doesn't work" threads — sometimes it works but the router simply doesn't report it. At production scale, only 28% of LLM calls show any cached input while system prompts eat 69% of input tokens — the largest unclaimed discount in most AI bills.

Verify it in 30 seconds — never trust vibes: send the same long-system-prompt request twice, then diff the usage fields:

OpenAI-style:    usage.prompt_tokens_details.cached_tokens   > 0 on the 2nd call?
Anthropic-style: usage.cache_read_input_tokens               > 0 on the 2nd call?

If the second call shows 0, you're paying full price — switch the route (provider-direct, or a gateway that passes cache_control through) and re-test.

Two different "caches" — they stack:

1. Provider prompt caching (the 75–90% discount above) — the gateway must pass through cache headers/params and report back the usage fields. LiteLLM supports Anthropic cache_control passthrough; check any gateway against the test above.
2. Gateway-side response caching (exact or semantic) — Kong, Bifrost, Zuplo, Cloudflare AI Gateway serve repeated/similar requests from their own cache at ~$0; this stacks on top of provider caching. See the cache column in Quick comparison.

📊 Observability & cost tracking

Pain point: "Who spent what, on which model, and why did quality drop?"

🔎 How to evaluate a gateway's observability (table-stakes vs differentiating vs advanced, grounded in the OpenTelemetry GenAI conventions): see BENCHMARKS → Part 6. For the research landscape — theory, seminal papers, company writing, standards & open problems: see the observability survey.

• Helicone ⭐ 5.9k — Logs, costs, sessions, prompt experiments; one-line proxy integration.
• TensorZero ⭐ 11.7k — ⚠️ Archived June 2026 (repo read-only; Apache-2.0 code + community forks remain). Gateway + observability + evals in one Rust binary, data stays in your ClickHouse.
• Portkey — Full LLMOps suite over its OSS gateway: traces, budgets, prompt management.
• vLLora (ex-LangDB) ⭐ 809 — Agent debugging and observability from the LangDB team.
• Braintrust Proxy ⭐ 404 — Caching proxy wired into Braintrust evals.
• MLflow AI Gateway ⭐ 27k — Unified endpoints + governance inside the MLflow platform.
• Respan (ex–Keywords AI) — One endpoint to 250+ models with routing/fallback/caching, plus built-in observability and evals.

☸️ Kubernetes-native & inference infra

Pain point: "Routing to self-hosted models (vLLM/Ollama) inside the cluster, GPU-aware."

• Gateway API Inference Extension ⭐ 710 — The Kubernetes standard for inference-aware routing.
• AIBrix ⭐ 5k — Cost-efficient control plane for vLLM on K8s (ByteDance-origin).
• llm-d ⭐ 3.8k — K8s-native distributed inference serving (Red Hat/Google/IBM-backed).
• Higress ⭐ 8.8k / Kong ⭐ 43.8k / Envoy AI Gateway ⭐ 1.8k — all implement inference-extension-style routing.
• Traefik Hub AI Gateway — LLM routing/security in Traefik's commercial runtime.
• Inference Gateway ⭐ 131 — Small cloud-native gateway unifying cloud + local (Ollama) providers.
• Olla ⭐ 254 — Lightweight Go proxy + load balancer for LLM infra: intelligent routing and automatic failover across inference backends (Ollama, vLLM, LM Studio, OpenAI-compatible).
• KServe ⭐ 5.7k — The standard model-inference platform on K8s; LLM serving with an inference-gateway / OpenAI-compatible runtime.
• GPUStack ⭐ 5.3k — Manage GPU clusters and serve LLMs behind one OpenAI-compatible endpoint.
• vLLM Production Stack ⭐ 2.4k — Reference K8s stack to serve vLLM at scale with a KV-cache-aware routing layer.
• NVIDIA Dynamo ⭐ 7.5k — NVIDIA's datacenter-scale distributed inference framework whose Endpoint Picker (EPP) plugin for the Gateway API Inference Extension does KV-cache-aware, LLM-aware request routing at the gateway layer over vLLM/SGLang/TensorRT-LLM backends.
• llmaz ⭐ 307 — K8s-native inference platform fronting heterogeneous backends (vLLM, SGLang, TGI, llama.cpp, TensorRT-LLM) with Envoy AI Gateway-based model routing and token rate-limiting, Gateway-API inference-pool routing, and LLM-metric HPA plus Karpenter autoscaling. Maintained but slower cadence (still v0.1.x).

Which gateway should I use

⚡ Fast answer — one sane default per need (alternatives in each linked section):

Do you want to self-host?
│
├─ NO — hosted, minimal ops
│   ├─ Cheapest access to many models ──────────▶ OpenRouter · Vercel AI Gateway (0% markup)
│   ├─ Free control plane over your own keys ───▶ Cloudflare AI Gateway
│   ├─ EU data residency matters ───────────────▶ Requesty · Eden AI · nexos.ai
│   └─ Already on one cloud ────────────────────▶ AWS Bedrock · Azure APIM · Vertex AI
│
└─ YES — self-hosted / open source
    ├─ Python stack, broadest features ─────────▶ LiteLLM
    ├─ Raw performance (Go/Rust/TS) ────────────▶ Bifrost · Portkey Gateway
    ├─ Built-in evals + observability ──────────▶ Helicone · LiteLLM · Bifrost
    ├─ Key distribution / billing / CN models ──▶ new-api · one-api · GPT-Load
    ├─ Enterprise K8s, audit, guardrails ───────▶ Kong · Higress · APISIX · Envoy AI Gateway
    └─ Governing AI agents & MCP traffic ───────▶ agentgateway · Lunar.dev

✅ Why trust this list

• Independent — no vendor money, no affiliate links, CC0. Unlike affiliate-driven relay "rankings," nobody pays to appear here.
• Reproducible, not asserted. Every cost cell is computed from open pricing data by a unit-tested script; stars refresh daily via CI.
• Honest about risk. We disclose CVEs, label archived/stale projects, and exclude gray-market relays — with the research to back it.

Why this matters: the same task can cost 100× more depending on the model behind your gateway. An AI gateway sits between your code and LLM providers — one endpoint, one key, many models — handling routing, failover, caching, rate limits, cost tracking and guardrails, so you change a base_url instead of rewriting your app. Pick the gateway here, then the evaluation set shows which model to route to.

⭐ Found this useful? Star it — that's how the next engineer choosing a gateway finds it. CC0, no signup, no tracking, no vendor money.

Quick comparison

Stars auto-refresh daily. ✅ built-in · ➕ via plugin/paid tier · ❌ not available.

¹ LiteLLM core is MIT; the repo contains a separately licensed enterprise directory.

📂 Browse the raw data (machine-readable, CC0): models & pricing JSON · cost table CSV · gateway scorecard CSV. Every cost cell is regenerated from this data by a unit-tested script.

The full directory at a glance — browse the sections below by your need.

The requirements map

Gateways get bought for eight distinct jobs. Find yours, jump straight to the evidence:

How common is each job? Survey-grounded. From the Amplify Partners 2026 AI Engineering Report (1,000+ engineers, with Notion & Vercel): 87% actively run multiple models together — routing is the default architecture, not the edge case (44% route by task type, 11% by cost). 75% adjust how ambitiously they use AI because of cost (40% say it regularly shapes ambition), and cost is the #2 most-monitored production metric after quality — which is why per-key cost attribution anchors the observability axis. 89% of agent-running teams now grant write permissions while guardrails stay primitive — the case for agent/MCP governance. And one number worth reading twice: only 20% put reliability in their top-3 selection criteria — yet peer-reviewed status-page measurements show the OpenAI and Anthropic APIs each fail about every 2 days (median MTBF 1.99 / 2.09 days) with ~1h median recovery, and only 6.15% of incidents get a postmortem (ICPE 2025); in production traffic, rate limits alone caused ~⅓ of all LLM errors (Datadog, Mar 2026). Engineers underweight failover until an event like the June-2026 Fable 5 pullout takes single-provider stacks offline for three weeks. Multi-provider routing is cheap insurance precisely because it's underpriced.

How to choose safely

Start by matching the gateway's trust level to your data's sensitivity — this one call decides most of the rest:

The mistake is using one trust tier for all your traffic. Sensitive prompts through a $0.50/M relay is how keys leak; throwaway prompts through a FedRAMP endpoint is how you overpay 100×. Match the tier to the data.

Then, whatever tier you're in:

1. Check the markup. Marketplaces charge 0–6% — for high volume, self-hosting or 0%-markup gateways (Vercel, Helicone cloud) pay for themselves fast.
2. Verify model fidelity (canary-diff test). Some relays silently downgrade or quantize models — and quantization spread is normal even on mainstream infrastructure: OpenRouter's own docs list eight quantization levels (int4 → fp32) a provider may serve for the same open-weight model (that's why the quantizations filter exists), and Moonshot's official K2-Vendor-Verifier measures tool-call schema accuracy for the same K2 model ranging from 100% (first-party API) down to ~83% across third-party hosts. Send fixed "canary" prompts — a known-hard reasoning question plus a tokenizer/fingerprint probe — through the gateway and direct to the provider, then diff the outputs — scripts/canary_check.py automates exactly this (relay vs. official → a verdict you can attach to a watch-list report). 2026 research found model-identity failures in ~46% of audited relays (arXiv:2603.01919). Community monitors apiranking.com and rate.linux.do (browser-only) track relay authenticity/stability — usable as signal if you must vet one, but listing there is not endorsement, and this list includes none of them.
3. Mind data flow. Every gateway sees your prompts. For sensitive data: self-host, or require ZDR (zero data retention) in writing.
4. License check before embedding. new-api is AGPL-3.0; LiteLLM has an enterprise-licensed directory; "open core" ≠ everything free.
5. Project health. Star count ≠ maintenance. Check last release date — several once-popular gateways (BricksLLM, Glide, RouteLLM) are effectively unmaintained; this list labels them.
6. Avoid gray-market relays reselling reverse-engineered or stolen-quota access. Beyond account-ban risk, 2026 research caught relays serving poisoned models and exfiltrating planted secrets (Your Agent Is Mine) — and the most-visible relay "rankings" are often paid press releases or carry affiliate links. Account bans and data leaks are your risk, not theirs. Caught one swapping models, harvesting data, or vanishing with your balance? Report it — with evidence — and we'll build the community watch list together.
7. Watch for the 2026 bait: "unlimited" plans that throttle. The scam vocabulary has moved upmarket — from fake relays to official-but-cheap subscription plans that are quietly speed-throttled into uselessness: "it's unlimited in practice because it's so slow there's no chance you'll spend your quota… the pay-as-you-go API is orders of magnitude faster than the subscription" (r/ClaudeCode on Z.ai's GLM coding plan, echoed here). Before buying any flat-rate plan: benchmark its throughput against the same vendor's pay-as-you-go API — a 10× speed gap is the tell.
8. Treat the gateway itself as supply chain. It sees every prompt and holds every provider key, so its own security posture is a buying criterion: in March 2026 LiteLLM's PyPI releases v1.82.7/.8 were backdoored via a CI-token compromise (quarantined in ~3h), and in June 2026 a LiteLLM RCE chain (CVE-2026-42271) entered CISA's KEV catalog — two different failure modes in one quarter, on the most-deployed OSS gateway. Practical hygiene: pin exact versions (never latest), watch the project's security advisories + KEV, patch the control plane fast, keep the admin UI off the public internet, and pre-vet any third-party relay with an audit tool like api-relay-audit ⭐ 752 (checks prompt injection, model substitution, tool-call rewriting, SSE anomalies).

🔒 Who sees your prompts? — the data-retention matrix

The #1 trust question, with no neutral cross-vendor answer anywhere. Here's one, from primary sources (machine-readable, verified 2026-07-08). Self-hosted gateways are omitted — you own the data plane.

The two things everyone misses: (1) On every router, your real exposure is the upstream you route to, not the router's own policy — a "ZDR-by-default" router still hits non-ZDR (or training) providers unless you turn on a ZDR-only / no-training filter. (2) "We delete after 30 days" is not always binding — OpenAI's API deletion is currently overridden by a court preservation order, and Azure quietly dropped its 30-day commitment. When it matters, get ZDR in the contract, and read the specific upstream endpoint's policy — not just the front-door marketing. Full evidence + source links per row: data/data_retention.json.

🧰 Companion tools — verify what you picked

This list tells you which gateway to start with; these two open-source tools — from this list's maintainer (disclosed) — help you prove it behaves before trusting it in production:

• llm-gateway-bench (live dashboard) — black-box benchmark for any OpenAI-compatible gateway/relay: TTFT & throughput, success rate, price multiple, plus fidelity probes (model-echo, fake-streaming, usage inflation, context truncation). Test your own gateway with your own key and compare it to the best.
• modelprobe — a tiny, dependency-free Go availability prober: point it at a base URL + key and it reports, per model, is it up and how fast. One static binary — drop it in CI or a cron on a $5 VM.

Community relay watch-list

Built on evidence, not hearsay. Newer or unusually cheap relays we've listed but not yet independently fidelity-checked sit here as "vet before use." Run the canary-diff test and report your verdict to move an entry to ✅ verified or ⛔ confirmed-problematic. The script diffs across one or more models in a single pass (--model a,b) and adds a tokenizer/fingerprint probe — system_fingerprint mismatch and prompt_tokens divergence on identical prompts — an independent tell beyond text similarity. A passing canary from a project's own team is logged as self-reported — reaching ✅ verified takes an independent reproduction by someone unaffiliated.

Nothing is ⛔ confirmed-problematic yet — that status needs a reproducible canary verdict or a documented incident, never hearsay.

📊 Latest evaluations

A running digest of fresh model, pricing and gateway evals — newest first, every entry dated and sourced. This is the fast-moving signal layer; for our own reproducible cost tables and model scorecard, see the full evaluation set. Spotted a new eval worth tracking? Add it.

📰 What's new

Curated monthly. Last review: 2026-06-30.

• 2026-06 · LiteLLM RCE added to CISA's KEV catalog — CVE-2026-42271 (an MCP command-injection) chains with a Starlette auth-bypass into unauthenticated remote code execution that can reach master keys and provider credentials (KEV-listed Jun 8; further CVEs Jun 16–22). Distinct from March's PyPI supply-chain attack — patch and lock down the gateway control plane. (CSA)
• 2026-06 · Envoy AI Gateway hit v1.0 (Jun 23) — the first production-stable open-source AI gateway built on CNCF Envoy: one API across 16 providers plus a native MCP gateway (backed by Tetrate, Bloomberg, Nutanix, Tencent). (release)
• 2026-06 · Hyperscalers converged on AI-gateway governance — Databricks shipped Unity AI Gateway (smart routing + hard spend caps) at Data+AI Summit, Azure API Management's AI-gateway features reached GA at Build, and AWS extended Bedrock AgentCore Gateway at Summit NY. Runtime governance is now table stakes. (Databricks)
• 2026-06 · Anthropic pulled Fable 5 & Mythos 5 offline globally under a US export-control directive (Jun 12–13), then restored them after the Dept of Commerce lifted the controls (Jun 30) — Fable 5 was back on the Claude platform, Claude.ai and Claude Code by Jul 2. The canonical "this is why you keep multi-provider failover" event of the year. (Fortune, CNBC)
• 2026-06 · GLM-5.2 is the new leading open-weight model — Z.ai's MIT-licensed 744B-param MoE (40B active, 1M context, open-weighted mid-June) tops the open-weight tier of the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index (score 51), taking the crown from the previous open leaders. (Artificial Analysis)
• 2026-02 · OpenRouter hit two more outages (Feb 17 & 19) — its caching layer dropped all DB connections, returning 401 "User not found" with request-failure rates up to ~80–90% (a DoS was ramping during the first). Even the dominant aggregator carries no SLA — a reason the cost-first picks here stay paired with self-host fallbacks. (postmortem)
• 2026-06 · TensorZero shut down — the VC-backed open-source LLMOps gateway ($7.3M seed) archived its repo on June 12, as first-party clouds ship native gateway/observability features and squeeze independents. (byteiota)
• 2026-03 · Helicone acquired by Mintlify (now maintenance mode); the same month LiteLLM hit a PyPI supply-chain attack — v1.82.7/1.82.8 were backdoored via a CI-token compromise and quarantined in ~3h, a sharp reminder to pin gateway versions. (Mintlify, Trend Micro)
• 2026-05 · Palo Alto Networks completed its acquisition of Portkey (announced Apr 30, closed May 29), making the AI gateway the control plane for its Prisma AIRS security platform — a sign gateways are becoming core security infrastructure. (Palo Alto Networks)
• 2026-05 · OpenRouter raised a $113M Series B led by CapitalG at a $1.3B valuation — ~8M users, ~100T tokens/month. (TechCrunch)
• 2026-06 · NetFoundry launched zero-trust MCP and LLM gateways; Cisco Investments joined its Series A. (PR Newswire)
• 2026 · Cloudflare AI Gateway shipped dollar-denominated spend limits (public beta) on top of dynamic routing and unified billing. (Cloudflare blog)
• 2025-11 · Pydantic AI Gateway went open beta and has since merged into Logfire. (Pydantic Logfire)
• Trend · MCP gateways emerged as a distinct category; spend-limit enforcement became table stakes; the EU AI Act (enforceable Aug 2026) is driving the compliance bucket; new-api overtook one-api as the most active China-ecosystem relay; and an independent-gateway shakeout is underway — Portkey (→Palo Alto) and Helicone (→Mintlify) acquired, TensorZero shut down, and the consolidation kept going (Katanemo→DigitalOcean, TrueFoundry→Seldon, Langfuse→ClickHouse).

🚀 Recent releases (auto-updated)

• 2026-07-12 · BerriAI/litellm v1.92.0 — v1.92.0
• 2026-07-11 · router-for-me/CLIProxyAPI v7.2.67 — v7.2.67
• 2026-07-11 · QuantumNous/new-api v1.0.0-rc.21 — v1.0.0-rc.21
• 2026-07-11 · looplj/axonhub v1.0.0-beta5 — v1.0.0-beta5
• 2026-07-10 · ENTERPILOT/GoModel v0.1.51 — v0.1.51
• 2026-07-10 · ascending-llc/jarvis-registry asc0.5.2 — Jarvis Registry asc0.5.2
• 2026-07-10 · archestra-ai/archestra platform-v1.3.8 — platform: v1.3.8
• 2026-07-10 · musistudio/claude-code-router v3.0.11 — v3.0.11
• 2026-07-10 · mnfst/manifest manifest@6.15.0 — manifest v6.15.0
• 2026-07-10 · Wei-Shaw/sub2api v0.1.151 — Sub2API 0.1.151
• 2026-07-10 · smart-mcp-proxy/mcpproxy-go v0.48.1 — v0.48.1
• 2026-07-10 · yym68686/uni-api v1.7.169 — Release 1.7.169

⚡ 10-second answers

The questions people actually ask (sourced from real threads) — answered first:

📚 Essential reading

A short, vetted shelf — every link below was HTTP-checked live (2026-06-15). These are the concepts the comparison tables assume; read them before you commit to a gateway.

What an AI gateway actually is

• The 2026 AI Engineering Report — Amplify Partners (with Notion & Vercel), 2026 — the survey behind the numbers this list assumes: 87% of 1,000+ engineers run multiple models together, 75% are cost-constrained, cost is the #2 production metric, and inference is the most bought (vs built) layer of the stack.
• State of AI Engineering — Datadog, 2026-04 — what the surveys claim, measured: live telemetry from 1,000+ orgs (>70% on 3+ models, rate limits ≈ ⅓ of LLM errors, only 28% of calls cached, system prompts = 69% of input tokens). Telemetry, not opinions — with a self-disclosed customer-base skew.
• State of AI: An Empirical 100-Trillion-Token Study — OpenRouter × a16z, 2026-01 — two years of real multi-provider gateway traffic: open-weight models at ~⅓ of tokens, rapid model turnover, and near-zero price elasticity (quality drives switching). The primary dataset on how routing actually behaves at scale.
• LLM Gateway: The One Decision That Removes 100 AI Engineering Decisions — Latent.Space (swyx), 2025-02 — why one gateway choice collapses routing, caching, observability and guardrails into a single control plane.
• AI Gateway — overview — Cloudflare — first-party docs defining the pattern: one endpoint in front of many providers, with caching, rate limiting, analytics and cost tracking.
• AI Gateway documentation — Kong — how gateway concerns (provider-agnostic routing, PII sanitization, token rate-limiting) map onto mature API-gateway infrastructure.

Routing & fallback

• Routing & load balancing — LiteLLM — cross-provider routing, weighted load balancing and tiered fallbacks from the most-deployed open-source gateway.
• Router architecture (fallbacks & retries) — LiteLLM — how retries-within-group and cross-group fallbacks escalate on 429s and connection errors — the mechanics for judging reliability.
• Load balancing — Portkey — weighted, sticky distribution across providers, models and keys so no single provider becomes a bottleneck.
• FrugalGPT: Using LLMs While Reducing Cost and Improving Performance — Chen, Zaharia & Zou (Stanford), 2023 — the foundational paper behind cost-aware routing: model cascades that try cheap-first and escalate only when needed.
• An Empirical Characterization of Outages and Incidents in Public Services for LLMs — Chu et al. (VU Amsterdam), ICPE 2025 — the peer-reviewed case for failover: across 8 LLM services, a failure lands roughly every 2 days per API (median MTBF 1.99–2.09 days), median recovery ~1h, and only 6.15% of incidents get a postmortem. Their conclusion: treat failure as normal operating procedure.
• LLM inference prices have fallen rapidly but unequally across tasks — Epoch AI, 2025-03 — the economics that make routing rational: the price of a fixed capability level falls 9×–900× per year (median 50×), so yesterday's flagship task is today's budget-tier route.

Semantic caching

• GPTCache documentation — Zilliz — the de-facto open-source semantic cache: embedding + vector-similarity vs. exact-match.
• GPTCache: An Open-Source Semantic Cache for LLM Applications — Fu Bang, EMNLP 2023 — the peer-reviewed case for similarity-matched caching to lift hit rates and cut cost/latency.

Prompt caching (it's a prefix match)

• Prompt caching — Anthropic — the authoritative spec: cache key from exact bytes up to a breakpoint, write/read pricing, and TTLs.
• Prompt caching — OpenAI — cache hits require an exact prefix; put static instructions first and variable content last to maximize reuse.

Reasoning-token cost

• Building with extended thinking — Anthropic — reasoning/thinking tokens are billed and consume the output budget — the economics to grasp before enabling reasoning models behind a gateway.

Security & guardrails

• OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications — OWASP, 2025 — the standard risk taxonomy; prompt injection is LLM01, the checklist any gateway's guardrails must answer to.
• Design patterns for securing LLM agents against prompt injection — Simon Willison, 2025-06 — six concrete architectural defenses (Dual LLM, Plan-Then-Execute, Action-Selector, …).
• LLM Prompt Injection Prevention Cheat Sheet — OWASP — a defense-in-depth checklist for what a gateway's guardrail layer should implement.

MCP & agent gateways

• Model Context Protocol — specification — the open standard any MCP gateway must speak and govern.
• Building effective agents — Anthropic, 2024 — when to use workflows vs. agents and the composable patterns (routing, orchestrator-workers) the traffic flowing through an agent gateway is made of.
• LLM Powered Autonomous Agents — Lilian Weng, 2023 — the canonical map of agent architecture (planning, memory, tool use) — what an MCP/agent gateway sits in front of and governs.

Observability

• AI Gateway observability — Cloudflare — per-request logs, token usage, cost estimation and OpenTelemetry export across all providers.
• How to monitor your LLM API costs — Helicone — practical cost-per-query tracking and spotting caching / model-downgrade opportunities.
• Your AI Product Needs Evals — Hamel Husain, 2024 — why systematic evals (not vibes) are how you actually catch quality regressions in the request/response data your gateway logs.

Self-hosting economics

• Automatic prefix caching — vLLM — KV-block prefix caching (and per-request cache isolation), the mechanism behind the savings when you self-host behind your own gateway.

Guides & comparisons

In-depth, data-backed comparisons for the questions people actually search:

• LiteLLM vs OpenRouter vs Portkey (2026) — which AI gateway should you use?
• LiteLLM alternatives (2026) — 8 gateways compared by cost, security & self-hosting
• OpenRouter alternatives (2026) — 0%-markup, EU-residency & self-hosted options compared
• Cloudflare vs Vercel AI Gateway (2026) — which 0%-markup hosted gateway?
• Best self-hosted AI gateway in 2026 — LiteLLM vs Bifrost vs Portkey vs Kong
• one-api vs new-api vs LiteLLM — Choosing a China-market LLM API gateway (Chinese)

More comparisons coming. Suggest one via an issue.

FAQ

What is an AI gateway (LLM gateway)? A proxy between your code and LLM providers: one OpenAI-compatible endpoint and key for many models, adding routing, failover, caching, rate limits, cost tracking and guardrails. See the intro.

AI gateway vs LLM router — what's the difference? A router decides which model gets each request (e.g. cheap vs flagship); a gateway is the full proxy layer (auth, caching, observability, guardrails) that usually includes routing. See smart routing.

What's the best open-source AI gateway? LiteLLM is the default for breadth (Python, 100+ providers). For raw performance pick Bifrost (Go); for enterprise K8s pick Kong or Higress. Full list under self-hosted.

LiteLLM vs OpenRouter — which should I use? OpenRouter is hosted (zero ops, ~5.5% fee, 400+ models); LiteLLM is self-hosted (your keys, your infra, $0 markup). Hosted to start, self-host when volume justifies it. Cost math in the evaluation set.

What's the cheapest way to call many LLMs? For zero ops: Vercel AI Gateway or Cloudflare AI Gateway (0% markup). For lowest token cost, route bulk work to cheap models — a 100K-token report runs $0.03 on DeepSeek vs $3.01 on GPT-5.5. See cost-first.

Are AI gateways safe? Who sees my prompts? Every gateway sees your prompts. For sensitive data self-host or require zero-data-retention in writing; check the gateway scorecard for compliance/security ratings and known CVEs.

Glossary

Why this exists

On June 10 I ran Claude Code hard for ~13 hours, and the bill came to ≈ $788. One look at the per-model breakdown told the whole story: the flagship (Fable 5) alone was $617 — 78% of the bill — while the cheap model (Haiku) did 242 real tasks for $1.70. I hadn't done anything clever to rack that up; I'd done the opposite — defaulted every request to the most capable (and most expensive) model because I couldn't be bothered to set up routing.

The fix wasn't "stop using good models." It was route by task — default to a cheap model, escalate to a flagship only when the work is genuinely hard. That's exactly what an AI gateway is for. While I was at it, I couldn't find a single gateway list organized by what you actually need, that scored the options honestly (CVEs and all), and shipped reproducible cost numbers instead of vibes. So I built one — that's this repo.

No vendor money, no affiliate links, CC0. If it saves you one surprise bill, it did its job. ⭐ Star it so the next person mid-$788-day finds it.

🔌 Use the data — it's an API

Everything behind the tables is machine-readable, CC0, and refreshed by CI — consume it directly (like models.dev, the raw files are the API):

Attribution appreciated, not required. If you build on it, tell us — we'll link you.

Contributing

Contributions welcome! Please read CONTRIBUTING.md first. Inclusion criteria, in short: the project must be an actual gateway/proxy/router for LLM or agent traffic (not an SDK wrapper or chat UI), publicly available, and active within the last 12 months — or clearly labeled as stale.

Listed here? You're welcome to show the badge — — snippet in CONTRIBUTING.md. It never changes your scores; those follow the rubric and evidence only.

🔗 Related lists

This list lives in the awesome-list ecosystem. If it doesn't have what you need, these well-maintained neighbors might — and the gateways here sit between their tools and the models:

• Awesome-LLMOps — the broader LLMOps landscape (serving, fine-tuning, observability) this list's gateways plug into.
• Awesome-LLM — models, papers and the wider LLM ecosystem.
• awesome-langchain — LangChain tools and LLM app frameworks that call through these gateways.
• awesome-mcp-servers — MCP servers to put behind the MCP & agent gateways here.

Maintain a related list and think this belongs in yours? Open an issue — cross-linking helps every list's readers.

Star history

License

To the extent possible under law, the contributors have waived all copyright and related rights to this work.