Best Open Source AI Gateway in 2026

TL;DR: Five open-source AI gateways compared on performance, features, and deployment. Bifrost (which I help maintain) leads on raw throughput; 11µs overhead at 5,000 RPS, written in Go. LiteLLM has the largest ecosystem but Python limits its ceiling. Kong and APISIX bring enterprise API management. Envoy AI Gateway is the newest entrant from the service mesh world. Here's what each actually delivers. If latency and self-hosting matter to your stack; Bifrost on GitHub . Apache 2.0 licensed, running in 30 seconds: npx -y @maximhq/bifrost . Docs | Website Why Open Source Matters for AI Gateways Look, here's the thing — managed AI gateways are convenient. Portkey, Helicone, Cloudflare AI Gateway — they all work. But the moment you're dealing with DPDPA compliance, sensitive prompt data, or just plain cost control at scale, "someone else's infrastructure" becomes a problem. Open source gives you three things managed gateways can't: Data sovereignty. Your prompts, your responses, your infra