Five LLM Gateway Tools Compared for Managing Production AI Traffic
As LLM applications scale to real users, challenges like rate limits, provider outages, and rising retry costs emerge around model API calls. An LLM gateway sits between an application and model providers, centralizing routing, load balancing, retries, authentication, and cost monitoring. A developer evaluated five widely used gateways — LiteLLM, Kong AI Gateway, Portkey, Bifrost, and Apache APISIX — to assess how each handles production-grade concerns. The comparison focused on traffic management, provider failover, latency, and operational control rather than model capabilities. While a gateway may be unnecessary for small single-provider apps, it becomes increasingly valuable as traffic grows and multi-provider complexity expands.
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