8 Best LiteLLM Alternatives 

On March 24, 2026, pip install litellm stopped being a safe command. For roughly three hours, PyPI served two poisoned releases, 1.82.7 and 1.82.8, that harvested cloud keys, SSH keys and API tokens from every machine that installed them. About a month later, a critical SQL injection in LiteLLM’s own proxy was being exploited within 36 hours of disclosure. 

LiteLLM is still good, MIT-licensed software. But both incidents hit the same nerve: a gateway is the one box that holds every key you have. 

So this guide to the best LiteLLM alternatives skips the speed leaderboard. It matches eight gateways to the reason you’re leaving, and asks a question most comparisons skip: who owns each one now. 

The shortlist 

• Lyzr OpenController: model, agent and tool governance inside your VPC, even air-gapped, and it finds agents nobody registered. 
• Bifrost: open-source Go gateway for teams that outgrew LiteLLM’s throughput. 
• Kong AI Gateway: AI traffic under the API platform you may already run. 
• Agent Router (formerly Envoy AI Gateway): vendor-neutral and Kubernetes-native. 
• TrueFoundry AI Gateway: managed governance that still deploys on-prem. 
• Portkey, now Prisma AIRS AI Gateway: feature-rich, and now part of Palo Alto Networks. 
• Cloudflare AI Gateway: nothing to host, generous free tier. 
• OpenRouter: one key, hundreds of models, zero infrastructure. 

Three reasons why teams start looking for a LiteLLM alternative

The key vault got picked twice: The March attack never touched LiteLLM’s code. Attackers poisoned Trivy, a scanner in LiteLLM’s CI pipeline, stole the PyPI publishing token and shipped malware; version 1.82.8 ran on every Python startup. With about 95 million downloads a month, it reached a lot of machines. 

The second hit was LiteLLM’s own bug. CVE-2026-42208 let an unauthenticated caller inject SQL through the Authorization header and reach the tables that store provider credentials. CISA added it to its exploited-vulnerabilities catalog on May 8; NVD scores it 9.8. 

Python sets a ceiling: LiteLLM’s own benchmark shows 8 ms P95 overhead at about 1,000 requests per second on four 4-vCPU instances, and a newer test in its docs reached 3,000 RPS using 33 gateway pods. Fine for many teams. Agent loops making dozens of calls per task want fewer boxes doing more. 

Governance sits behind a licence: Virtual keys and budgets are free. SSO beyond five users, audit logs and RBAC are not. 

The gateway market changed owners this year 

Gartner expects 70% of software teams building multimodel apps to use an AI gateway by 2028, up from 25% in 2025. Acquirers noticed. 

Palo Alto Networks bought Portkey for $117 million in May. Mintlify bought Helicone in March and put it in maintenance mode, which is why it isn’t on this list. Envoy AI Gateway became Agent Router in September. 

Swapping the box in front of every model call twice in a year hurts, so ask who will own the roadmap in 2028. 

Five questions LiteLLM alternatives have to answer 

Here are the five most important questions you must ask about the tool you are planning to replace LiteLLM with:

1. Can you swap the base URL and go? All eight speak the OpenAI format. Test streaming and tool calls anyway. 

2. Where do the provider keys live? Your network, or someone else’s. 

3. Will a budget actually stop a team? Virtual keys with hard limits beat a dashboard you read after the bill lands. 

4. Can it run with no internet at all? Regulated teams need an air-gapped option, not a roadmap slide. 

5. Does it see all agent traffic? Agents call MCP tools and other agents, and some were never registered. A model-only gateway misses both. 

The 8 best LiteLLM alternatives 

1. Lyzr OpenController 

OpenController covers what LiteLLM’s proxy does: virtual keys, team budgets, rate limits, routing, fallback and caching, including for models you host. Its sample trace shows a claude-sonnet-4.5 call hitting a 429 and landing on gpt-4.1 in 212 ms. 

The difference is what sits beside it. Guardrails screen every input, output and tool call for prompt injection, PII and secrets, and an agent gateway governs what agents call besides models. Read-only discovery across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Kubernetes and developer laptops also finds agents that never registered; the sample scan surfaces 145 of 1,284. Everything runs in your VPC, on-prem or air-gapped, and customer-managed deployments don’t need credentials or telemetry to reach Lyzr. If keys are why you’re leaving, that’s the line to read twice. 

Pick it if the gateway has to sit inside your network and govern agents and tools along with model calls. Skip it if you need one proxy for one app. A control plane is more than that job asks for. 

How to Take Agents to Production: What has to be in place between a working demo and an agent you can run, audit and pay for at scale. Get the playbook → 

2. Bifrost 

Maxim AI’s Go gateway is the most direct swap for teams leaving over speed. Its own benchmark at 500 RPS shows 424 requests per second against LiteLLM’s 44.84, P99 latency of 1.68 s against 90.72 s, and 68% lower peak memory. Maxim also reports as little as 11 µs of added overhead at 5,000 RPS. Vendor numbers, so rerun them on your traffic. The Apache 2.0 build includes virtual keys, hierarchical budgets, semantic caching and an MCP gateway, so governance doesn’t start with a sales call. 

Pick it if throughput is your reason for leaving and you want to keep self-hosting.  

Skip it if you want independent proof first. Nearly every published Bifrost number comes from Maxim itself. 

3. Kong AI Gateway 

Kong gave AI its own release train this year. AI Gateway 2.0 went GA on September 1 with MCP server bundling, identity-aware policies and cost tracking per modality, cache operations included. Version 2.2 followed on September 30 with a passthrough mode for self-hosted servers such as vLLM, Ollama and NVIDIA NIM. Bundled MCP servers sit behind one route, and each caller sees only the tools its policy allows. 

Pick it if Kong already fronts your APIs and you want one policy engine for both.  

Skip it if you need everything on-prem. Kong’s docs mark the 2.x AI control plane as incompatible with on-prem; self-managed teams use the AI plugins on Kong Gateway 3.x. 

4. Agent Router (formerly Envoy AI Gateway) 

Started by Bloomberg and Tetrate engineers, this Envoy-based project joined the Agentic AI Foundation as Agent Router on September 10, 2026, keeping its code and Apache 2.0 licence. Version 1.0 covers 16 providers, an MCP gateway with per-caller tool filtering, and token accounting that separates input, output, cached and reasoning tokens. Version 1.1 added failover when a stream stalls before its first token, and 1.2 (October 9) hardened multi-user MCP security. 

Pick it if your platform team runs Kubernetes with the Gateway API and wants no single vendor in charge of the roadmap.  

Skip it if you don’t run Kubernetes. SSO and per-agent budgets are sold in Tetrate’s commercial Agent Router product. 

5. TrueFoundry AI Gateway 

TrueFoundry sells governance as a product, then lets you run it on-prem, in your VPC or air-gapped. It covers 1,600+ models, MCP servers and agents, and quotes about 3 ms of latency at 250 RPS per pod. Buying Seldon in June added classic ML serving. Paid plans start at $499 a month (Pro); Pro Plus, at $2,999, adds stricter data controls and priority SLAs without self-hosting. 

Pick it if you want LiteLLM’s self-hosting with SSO, RBAC and audit already built in.  

Skip it if a lightweight proxy is all you need. You’re buying a platform. 

6. Portkey (now Prisma AIRS AI Gateway) 

In March 2026 Portkey open-sourced its whole gateway, governance and MCP gateway included. At the time it reported 24,000+ organizations and $180 million in annualized AI spend running through it. Two months later Palo Alto Networks bought it and made it the AI Gateway for Prisma AIRS. It’s still strong on routing, guardrails and scoped credentials. Its roadmap now follows a security suite. 

Pick it if you’re a Palo Alto shop and want gateway and AI runtime security from one vendor.  

Skip it if you picked Portkey for developer experience and vendor neutrality. That roadmap has a new owner. 

7. Cloudflare AI Gateway 

Hate running a proxy? Cloudflare runs it for you, with analytics, caching and rate limiting free on every plan. Dynamic routing, DLP scanning of prompts and responses and stored provider keys arrived in 2025, and since August 2026 one credit balance pays for Workers AI and supported third-party models. Unified billing can also enforce opt-in Zero Data Retention with providers such as OpenAI. 

Pick it if you’re a small team, already on Cloudflare, and want logs from day one.  

Skip it if keys must stay in your network. There’s no self-hosted option, and model-first failover was still on the roadmap in August. 

8. OpenRouter 

OpenRouter is a marketplace you call, not a gateway you run: one key, hundreds of models, no markup on inference. It charges 5.5% on credit purchases (8% on Business). With your own provider keys, the first $25,000 a month is fee-free, then 5%. The free tier allows 50 requests a day and 20 a minute on free models. One catch: a failing key falls back to OpenRouter’s own account by default. 

Pick it if you’re prototyping across many models and governance can wait.  

Skip it if you need data residency, audit trails or budgets per team. 

Eight gateways side by side 

✓ built in · ◐ partial, paid tier, separate product or not documented end to end · ✗ not in public docs we reviewed. Editorial assessment, October 2026, based on the vendor documentation cited under each product; confirm with each vendor. 

Pick by the reason you’re leaving 

Security drove you out? Keep keys inside your boundary with OpenController, TrueFoundry, or Agent Router if you staff Kubernetes. Throughput: Bifrost. The licence wall: Bifrost or Portkey. No more servers: Cloudflare or OpenRouter, accepting that traffic leaves the building. 

Our take: a faster proxy fixes the wrong problem if security is why you’re leaving. A gateway concentrates every credential, so give it vault rules: it runs in your network, its packages are pinned by hash, it traces every call, and it knows which agent made it. Benchmarks come after. 

Migrate without a weekend cutover 

1. Find every LiteLLM. The proxy is obvious. The SDK hides inside CrewAI, DSPy and other frameworks. 

2. Rotate first. Any key that sat in a LiteLLM database, or on a runner that pulled 1.82.7 or 1.82.8, gets replaced. 

3. Mirror 10% of traffic. Compare cost per call, P95 latency and errors for a week. 

4. Rebuild limits. Map each old virtual key to a team, an owner and a budget. 

5. Cut over and lock down. Pin versions by hash, check for stray .pth files, keep the old proxy read-only for 30 days. 

Agent Governance Maturity Assessment: Score how well you control keys, budgets and agent access today, and see what to fix before the next incident. Take the assessment → 

Buy the gateway like a vault 

Most teams picked LiteLLM because it was the quickest route to many models. Good reason to start, poor reason to stay. Your next gateway will hold the same keys and see the same prompts, so judge where it runs and who owns it before you time it. 

Book a demo and we’ll route a slice of your LiteLLM traffic through OpenController inside your own VPC. 

FAQ

Related reading: Best tools for PII redaction in LLM calls · Best platforms for AI agent control plane management · Best tools for AI policy enforcement at scale 

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