LiteLLM Alternatives: 9 Proxy and Gateway Options in 2026
Nine LiteLLM alternatives for 2026, grouped by the job each one performs: enterprise API governance, routed model access, edge observability, self-hosted AI platforms and agent-traffic controls. The comparison separates LiteLLM’s Python SDK from its Proxy Server and identifies the policy, identity and audit evidence each option provides.
LiteLLM alternatives fall into five distinct jobs: enterprise API governance, routed model access, edge observability, self-hosted AI platforms and agent-traffic control. Pick the job before comparing products. The LiteLLM Python SDK normalizes 100-plus providers into OpenAI format inside your application, with no server. The LiteLLM Proxy Server, which BerriAI also markets as an AI gateway, is a standalone HTTP proxy with virtual keys, budgets, rate limits, guardrails and logging. Proxy CVEs apply to that HTTP service, not to the embedded SDK.
I want to give an honest comparison because a MuleSoft or Kong buyer needs a concrete architecture decision. LiteLLM is widely used for good reasons and is actively hardening. A team choosing an alternative should identify whether it needs a router or an enforcement point. Those products share the word gateway while serving separate roles.
TL;DR
Choose a LiteLLM alternative by the control point required on the request path. Kong and Apigee suit enterprise API governance, Envoy and Bifrost center on routing, and DeepInspect adds identity-bound policy plus per-decision evidence for routed HTTP LLM calls.
Why teams look for an alternative
Two reasons, and I will be fair about both.
The first is the 2026 security record on the proxy. After a suspected supply-chain incident in March 2026, BerriAI brought in Veria Labs for an audit and launched a bug bounty, followed by several CVEs. CVE-2026-42271, an authenticated command injection in the MCP stdio test endpoints affecting versions 1.74.2 up to 1.83.7, was added to the CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog on June 8, 2026, and it escalates to unauthenticated remote code execution when chained with CVE-2026-48710, a Starlette host-header bypass. Over the June 21-22 weekend a batch of five more arrived, led by CVE-2026-12773, an auth bypass in the UserAPIKeyAuth path scored 7.3 by the issuing CNA and re-scored 9.8 by NVD. I wrote about what the LiteLLM CVE wave teaches about control-plane design separately. The fair caveats: the critical bypasses were gated behind non-default configuration or untrusted network reachability, BerriAI states no LiteLLM Cloud customers were affected, and all of it hit the proxy rather than the SDK.
The second reason is operational. LiteLLM moves fast, ships weekly, and ran a public stability campaign in 2026 with load tests and incident post-mortems. It is now porting the gateway to Rust. A team that wants a slower, heavier, more governance-first layer looks elsewhere, and that is a fit decision rather than a verdict.
What LiteLLM Enterprise adds, and where it stops
The paid tier adds SSO and SAML, SCIM, OIDC and JWT auth, key and team guardrails, secret-manager integration, key rotation, and audit logs, and BerriAI holds SOC 2 Type 2 and ISO 27001. One precision matters for anyone evaluating it for compliance: the enterprise audit logs record create, update, and delete on Teams and Virtual Keys. That is management-plane change tracking. It is a different artifact than a signed per-request record of what each AI call did with what data under which identity.
The alternatives, sorted by what each enforces
Kong AI Gateway is the enterprise API-governance option. It extends API management to LLM, MCP and A2A traffic with PII sanitization, semantic prompt guards, access control, token and quota management, RBAC and audit.
Portkey is the security-vendor gateway. Palo Alto Networks announced its acquisition in April 2026. Portkey provides guardrails, RBAC, virtual keys, budgets, organization audit logs and broad model coverage as part of Prisma AIRS.
Apigee with Model Armor is Google Cloud API management. Apigee provides authentication, quotas and cost visibility. Model Armor adds prompt-injection detection and sensitive-data protection for Google Cloud users.
Cloudflare AI Gateway handles edge observability and control. Its core capabilities are analytics, logging, caching, rate limiting and fallback, while DLP and Guardrails remain Beta.
Vercel AI Gateway provides Vercel-native routed access. Its unified endpoint supports zero data retention by default, provider allowlists, disallow-training controls and spend caps. It does not publish identity-bound policy or signed request evidence.
OpenRouter is a hosted model marketplace. It offers PII and injection guardrails, budgets and allowlists bound to API credentials, with prompts transiting a SaaS service.
Envoy AI Gateway is open-source routing. Its 1.0 release shipped on 23 June 2026 with 16-provider routing, an MCP gateway, quota-aware multi-tenancy, upstream authentication and OpenTelemetry.
agentgateway provides open-source agent-traffic governance. Created by Solo.io and donated to the Linux Foundation in August 2025, it addresses A2A and MCP authorization, observability and governance for agent-to-tool traffic.
TrueFoundry and Bifrost are self-hosted platform choices. TrueFoundry runs an LLM, MCP and agent-routing platform in a customer's VPC with RBAC, budgets and guardrails. Bifrost is an open-source, Go-based routing layer with load balancing, virtual credentials, budgets, rate limits, guardrails and MCP client/server support.
Routing versus enforcement, precisely
The selection test is the request path your team needs to govern. OpenRouter, Vercel, Bifrost and Helicone center on routing and observability. Kong, Apigee with Model Armor, Portkey inside Palo Alto and TrueFoundry make governance claims. Envoy AI Gateway focuses on routing, authentication and multi-tenancy; its published material does not describe prompt-level classification. LiteLLM Enterprise offers SSO, guardrails and management-plane audit.
Regulated workloads need per-request identity-bound policy, prompt-level classification across regulated data types, signed per-decision audit records and a fail-closed posture. The difference between a firewall, a gateway, and a proxy explains the distinct enforcement role. See LiteLLM versus an AI security gateway for the request-path comparison, and AI gateway architecture for the deployment choices.
DeepInspect
This is the gap DeepInspect closes, and it is a different layer than most of the list rather than a replacement for it. Many teams keep LiteLLM, Envoy AI Gateway, or OpenRouter as the routing layer and add DeepInspect for enforcement and evidence.
DeepInspect is a stateless proxy at the AI request boundary. It binds each call to the natural-person or agent identity the application supplies, classifies the prompt content against the regulated categories your sector recognizes, applies per-route and per-role policy, and commits a signed per-decision audit record before the response returns, on a write path the application never holds. It is deterministic, fail-closed and model-agnostic, so it runs in front of whichever router you chose. The security properties a gateway needs are identity binding, classification and independent evidence. Book a technical deep dive at deepinspect.ai.
Frequently asked questions
- Is LiteLLM safe to use in 2026?
The LiteLLM Proxy had a genuine run of CVEs in 2026, including one added to the CISA KEV catalog, and BerriAI has responded with an external audit, a bug bounty, a stability program, and a Rust rewrite. The critical bypasses were gated behind non-default configuration or untrusted network reachability, and BerriAI states no Cloud customers were affected. The Python SDK was not the vulnerable surface. Whether it is safe for you depends on your deployment: patch to a current release, avoid exposing the proxy to untrusted networks, and treat the gateway's own auth surface as a target.
- What is the difference between the LiteLLM SDK and the proxy?
The SDK is a library you import into your application to normalize many providers into OpenAI format, running in your process with no server. The proxy is a standalone HTTP gateway with virtual keys, budgets, rate limits, guardrails, and logging. The proxy is the product people compare to other gateways and the surface every 2026 CVE targeted. Conflating the two produces the incorrect claim that "LiteLLM is insecure" when the SDK and the proxy have entirely different exposure.
- Which LiteLLM alternative is the most secure?
That depends on what you mean by secure. For enterprise API governance, Kong and Apigee with Model Armor are strong. For a self-hosted platform in your VPC, TrueFoundry fits. Portkey is now inside Palo Alto Networks and folds into Prisma AIRS. DeepInspect supplies the separate request-path layer in front of whichever router you pick: identity-bound policy, prompt classification, and a signed decision record for routed AI traffic.
- Should I switch away from LiteLLM entirely?
LiteLLM's provider coverage and routing are widely used for good reason, and switching a router is disruptive. A common pattern is to keep LiteLLM for routing and add an enforcement layer in front of it for identity-bound policy and independent audit evidence. That separates the concern LiteLLM handles well, reaching many models, from the concern a regulated workload needs handled independently, proving what each call did under which identity.
- Do these gateways produce audit records regulators accept?
Most produce operational logs and traces, and some, like LiteLLM Enterprise and Portkey, add management-plane audit logs tracking configuration changes. Those are valuable for running the platform. A regulator testing EU AI Act Article 12 traceability or a DORA review is asking a narrower question: is there an independent, tamper-evident record of each AI decision tied to an identity. Few routing gateways produce that, because a trace written by the system under review is the self-attestation problem, and independence is the property the auditor is testing.