Top AI gateways of 2026: Bifrost, Portkey, and others ranked

In 2026, the AI gateway market has seen significant activity, with several key players emerging as leaders. Bifrost, an open-source gateway written in Go, leads the pack with strong performance metrics, including 11 µs latency at 5,000 RPS. Portkey, now owned by Palo Alto Networks, offers deep guardrail capabilities and supports routing to over 1,600 models. LiteLLM, the most widely adopted open-source gateway, supports 100+ providers and has a robust ecosystem. Kong AI Gateway brings mature API management to AI traffic, while TrueFoundry leads in Gartner Peer Insights with a 4.8 rating. Cloudflare and Vercel offer managed gateways with competitive pricing, and OpenRouter provides broad model access with no markup. The market’s rapid evolution highlights the importance of vendor and security considerations for production teams. The article also notes recent developments, such as Mintlify acquiring Helicone and LiteLLM surviving a PyPI supply chain compromise. These events underscore the growing complexity and risks associated with AI gateway selection. The guide emphasizes the need for teams to carefully evaluate gateways based on performance, security, and feature sets to meet their specific needs.