Benchmark Study: Bifrost Outperforms LiteLLM for Enterprise AI Gateway Use

A security and operations engineer compared two open-source AI gateways, Bifrost and LiteLLM, using an open-source benchmarking tool on a shared-CPU VPS with four vCPUs and no real provider keys. At 100 requests per second, Bifrost's median latency was 1.01 ms versus LiteLLM's 5.84 ms, a gap that widened significantly at higher loads. At 1,000 RPS, LiteLLM dropped 5.1% of requests and recorded a p99 latency of nearly 34 seconds, while Bifrost maintained 100% success with a p99 of just 2.62 ms. Beyond raw speed, the reviewer noted differences in security defaults, memory usage (60 MiB vs 2.08 GiB at rest), and licensing, with Bifrost using Apache-2.0 and LiteLLM's enterprise features under a separate license. The author concludes Bifrost is the stronger enterprise choice, while recommending LiteLLM for teams already extending it in Python or operating well below capacity limits.