Production teams are turning to LLM gateways to avoid vendor lock-in and manage costs. One engineer tested five solutions after an OpenAI outage cost his team thousands in wasted compute. Bifrost emerged as the performance leader, adding just 11 microseconds of latency at 5,000 requests per second.

LiteLLM remains popular for its broad provider support—over 100 APIs including niche models. However, Python-based architecture limits scalability. It crashed under 1,000 RPS due to memory exhaustion. Teams using it should expect degraded performance above 500 RPS.

For enterprise governance, Portkey offers deep observability, compliance controls, and audit trails. Healthcare teams praised its PII detection and HIPAA support. Meanwhile, Helicone provides lightweight Rust-based routing with flexible deployment options. Kong AI Gateway suits existing Kong users needing infrastructure-level integration.

Next, teams must weigh performance against feature depth. Bifrost suits high-scale real-time apps. Portkey fits regulated industries. LiteLLM works for prototyping. Most teams will choose based on traffic patterns and compliance needs.