A ranked comparison of nine AI gateway products for production teams in 2026: Bifrost, Portkey, LiteLLM, Kong AI Gateway, TrueFoundry, Cloudflare AI Gateway, Vercel AI Gateway, OpenRouter and Orq.ai Router. Rankings weigh published performance, provider coverage, governance features, deployment flexibility, cost model and vendor/supply-chain risk. Notable context includes Palo Alto Networks' acquisition of Portkey, Mintlify's acquisition of Helicone (now in maintenance mode), and a LiteLLM PyPI supply chain compromise in March. Bifrost is named best for self-hosted performance (11 µs overhead at 5,000 RPS), Portkey for open-source guardrails, LiteLLM for widest adoption, and Cloudflare/Vercel/OpenRouter as top managed options.
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TL;DRHow We Ranked These AI GatewaysQuick Comparison: 9 Best AI Gateways1. Bifrost (Maxim AI)2. Portkey3. LiteLLM4. Kong AI Gateway5. TrueFoundry AI Gateway6. Cloudflare AI Gateway7. Vercel AI Gateway8. OpenRouter9. Orq.ai RouterHow to Choose the Right AI GatewayKey TakeawaysQuestions this post answers
What caused the LiteLLM PyPI supply chain compromise and what should I do about it?
LiteLLM experienced a PyPI supply chain compromise in March, disclosed via a GitHub issue on the BerriAI/litellm repository. Since a gateway holds every provider API key an organization owns, the recommended mitigation is to pin gateway versions with hash checks rather than relying on floating version ranges, and to verify releases before upgrading. Teams pinning dependencies to avoid supply chain risk can follow AI gateway security updates on daily.dev.
How does Bifrost's latency compare to LiteLLM at high request volumes?
Bifrost, a Go-based open-source AI gateway, reports 11 microseconds of added latency at 5,000 requests per second on a t3.xlarge instance, and 59 microseconds on a t3.medium. In a benchmark run by Maxim AI against LiteLLM, Bifrost showed P99 latency of 1.68 seconds versus LiteLLM's 90.72 seconds at 500 RPS. Engineers choosing a self-hosted AI gateway for throughput can compare benchmark claims on daily.dev.
Who owns Portkey and Helicone now, and does that affect using them in production?
Palo Alto Networks completed its acquisition of Portkey on May 29 and is folding it into its Prisma AIRS product line, while Mintlify acquired Helicone, which now runs in maintenance mode. Both ownership changes introduce roadmap and vendor-lock risk for teams depending on these gateways, separate from their technical feature sets. Developers tracking vendor risk before committing to a gateway can follow ownership changes on daily.dev.
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