Open Source Vercel AI Gateway Alternatives

LiteLLM is an LLM gateway built for platform teams that need to give developers access to many different AI providers without managing the complexity of each one individually. It sits between your applications and providers like OpenAI, Anthropic, Azure, Gemini, and Bedrock, exposing a single OpenAI-compatible API regardless of which model is actually handling the request.

The core appeal is normalization. Every provider has its own API shape, authentication scheme, and error format. LiteLLM abstracts all of that away, so your developers write code once and can swap or add models without touching their integration.

Key capabilities include:

• Spend tracking and budgets: Assign virtual keys to teams or users, set hard spending limits, and get accurate per-team cost breakdowns.
• Rate limiting: Enforce RPM and TPM caps per key, team, or model to prevent runaway usage.
• Load balancing and fallbacks: Route requests across multiple deployments of the same model, and automatically fall back to a secondary provider when one fails.
• LLM observability: Native integrations with Langfuse, Arize Phoenix, LangSmith, and OpenTelemetry for logging and tracing.
• Guardrails: Apply input/output filtering before requests reach the model.
• Pass-through endpoints and S3 logging: For teams that need raw request capture or custom routing.

The open source version covers the full feature set for most teams. The enterprise tier adds SSO, JWT auth, audit logs, and custom SLAs for larger organizations.

LiteLLM is self-hostable via Docker and has seen over 240 million pulls. Netflix uses it to give developers access to new models within a day of release, citing the elimination of per-provider input/output transformation as the main time saver.

Portkey provides a comprehensive production stack that equips AI teams with everything needed to deploy and scale generative AI applications. The platform combines AI Gateway, Observability, Guardrails, Governance, and Prompt Management in a single, integrated solution.

Key Features:

• Unified API Access: Connect to 1,600+ LLMs through a single interface, eliminating integration complexity
• Real-time Observability: Monitor LLM behavior, catch anomalies early, and manage usage proactively with comprehensive dashboards
• Enterprise Security: Built-in guardrails, PII redaction, and RBAC ensure secure AI deployment
• Cost Optimization: Advanced caching, budget controls, and resource monitoring help reduce AI expenses significantly
• 3-Line Integration: Deploy in minutes without changing existing code infrastructure

Production Benefits:

• 99.999% uptime with strict SLAs for mission-critical applications
• Sub-millisecond latency through lightweight, performant gateway architecture
• 50% faster time-to-market with full-stack LLMOps capabilities
• Enterprise governance with detailed activity logs and compliance features

Trusted by 3,000+ AI teams and processing billions of tokens daily, Portkey serves both Fortune 500 companies and startups. The platform includes Model Context Protocol support for advanced agent workflows and offers seamless collaboration tools with role-based access control.

Ultra-high performance AI gateway built for enterprise-scale applications. With just 20 microseconds added latency and 5,000 requests per second throughput, it delivers exceptional speed while maintaining enterprise-grade reliability.

Key performance advantages:

• 50x faster than LiteLLM with 54x better P99 latency
• 68% less memory usage for optimal resource efficiency
• 9.5x higher throughput with 11.22% better success rates
• 99.99% uptime through automatic provider fallback

Comprehensive model access to over 1000+ AI models from 8+ providers including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and custom deployments through a unified interface. Drop-in replacement requiring just one line of code change - compatible with existing OpenAI, Anthropic, LiteLLM, LangChain, and Vercel AI SDK implementations.

Enterprise-ready features include virtual key management with independent budgets, real-time guardrails for model protection, built-in MCP gateway for tool management, and comprehensive governance with SSO integration. Built-in observability with OpenTelemetry support and dashboard for monitoring without complex setup.

Open-source with Apache 2.0 license, active Discord community support, and 14-day free enterprise trial available.

Envoy AI Gateway is a community-driven open source project that leverages the power of Envoy Gateway to intelligently route and manage request traffic between application clients and GenAI services. Built collaboratively by the open source community, this solution addresses the growing need for reliable GenAI traffic handling.

Key Features:

• Multi-Provider Support: Routes traffic to 16+ LLM providers out of the box, including OpenAI, Anthropic, AWS Bedrock, Azure OpenAI, Google Gemini, and more
• Enterprise-Ready: Built on proven Envoy technology trusted by organizations worldwide
• Community-Driven: Actively maintained with regular releases and community meetings
• Production-Tested: Already adopted by organizations for real-world GenAI workloads

The project offers seamless integration with major AI providers like Cohere, DeepInfra, Groq, Mistral, SambaNova, and Vertex AI, making it easy to switch between providers or implement multi-provider strategies. With its latest v0.4 release, the gateway continues to expand capabilities and provider integrations.

Join the growing community through Slack, GitHub discussions, and weekly community meetings to contribute to this essential piece of GenAI infrastructure.

Route, manage, and analyze your LLM requests across multiple providers with a unified API interface that's compatible with the OpenAI API format for seamless migration.

Key Features:

• Unified API Interface - Compatible with OpenAI API format for easy integration
• Multi-provider Support - Connect to OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and more through one gateway
• Usage Analytics - Track requests, tokens, response times, and costs across all providers
• Performance Monitoring - Compare different models' performance and cost-effectiveness
• Secure Key Management - Manage API keys for different providers in one secure place
• Self-hosted or Cloud - Deploy on your infrastructure or use hosted version

Simple Integration - Just change your API endpoint and keep your existing code. Works with any language or framework including Python, TypeScript, Java, Rust, Go, PHP, and Ruby.

Flexible Pricing:

• Self-Host: 100% free forever with full control over your data
• Free Plan: Access to all models with 5% gateway fee
• Pro Plan: $50/month with zero fees when using your own API keys
• Enterprise: Custom solutions with advanced security and 24/7 support

Perfect for developers and organizations looking to optimize their AI infrastructure while maintaining flexibility and control over costs.

Grepture is an AI gateway that intercepts every LLM request your app makes, rather than observing from the outside. It redacts PII, blocks prompt injections, and enforces rules before data leaves your network. At the same time, it captures full traces, scores responses with built-in evals, and tracks token costs. One integration point handles all of it.

The TypeScript SDK wraps your existing OpenAI, Anthropic, or Gemini client with a single options call. No restructuring your codebase. It also works with Azure OpenAI, Cohere, Mistral, AWS Bedrock, HuggingFace, Groq, and Replicate.

Key capabilities:

• Tracing Full-text search across prompts and responses, waterfall timelines for multi-step agent traces, and request replay with before/after diffs.
• Built-in evals LLM-as-judge scoring runs on live traffic with six templates out of the box. No separate eval pipeline to set up or maintain.
• PII redaction 80+ detection rules identify and redact sensitive fields in-flight. Redaction happens before data reaches any external service.
• Cost tracking Token usage and spend are logged per request, so you can catch runaway costs before users notice.
• Zero-data mode Grepture can process every request without writing content to disk. Only operational metadata (method, status, latency, rule hits) is stored.
• Prompt management Centralized prompt storage accessible across your stack.

For teams with compliance requirements, all infrastructure runs in Frankfurt and Nuremberg. Every subprocessor is EU-based, with no US data transfers. The setup is GDPR-ready by default, which puts it ahead of alternatives like Cloudflare AI Gateway for European deployments.

The gateway is fully open source. Every detection rule and redaction action is readable on GitHub, so there's no black-box processing to audit around. Teams that need complete infrastructure control can self-host. A free tier covers up to 1,000 requests per month.