Considering AI Gateway alternatives?

Move beyond AI experimentation and confidently deliver AI solutions into production with Kong.

The market for AI gateways is rapidly expanding, with a growing number of offerings that focus on managing and securing LLM traffic, adding guardrails, and providing visibility into AI usage. Many of these solutions, however, are narrowly scoped point products — designed for basic AI proxying or single-vendor ecosystems — and lack the maturity, flexibility, and governance capabilities required by enterprises.

As organizations move beyond experimentation into production-scale AI adoption, the need for a comprehensive API + AI platform becomes clear. Enterprises don’t just need an AI proxy; they need a platform that unifies API and AI governance, supports hybrid and multi-cloud environments, and enforces policies across both human and machine consumers. This is where Kong delivers a major advantage: by extending a proven API platform into the AI era, Kong combines best-in-class runtime performance with enterprise-grade governance, cost control, and extensibility.

To help enterprises evaluate their options, we’ve organized this analysis into three major product areas:

    Core AI Functionality

    AI gateways are critical infrastructural components for exposing LLMs to developers, applications, and AI agents in a secure, reliable, and cost-effective manner.

    When your AI Gateway limits the number of models you can use, you limit your business’ AI potential.

    • Kong: Multi-LLM support across thousands of models with a unified abstraction layer, integrated into the same Kong Gateway runtime layer.
    • LiteLLM: Supports a broad catalog across multiple providers.
    • Portkey: Supports a broad catalog across multiple providers.
    • Databricks Mosaic: Primarily tied to models hosted in the Databricks/MosaicML ecosystem; limited cross-vendor flexibility. Even when connecting to external providers, workloads remain tied to Databricks’ control plane.
    • Solo Gloo: Extends Kubernetes Gateway API to AI traffic; supports external LLMs but optimized for K8s-native deployments.
    • Google Apigee: Treats each LLM as an API proxy, with the ability to route to Gemini, Vertex-hosted models, as well as external providers like OpenAI or Anthropic. It offers broad connectivity, but lacks a unified multi-model abstraction layer. All orchestration assumes Apigee + Vertex AI, introducing partial Google lock-in.
    • AWS Bedrock: Aggregates a broad set of models under the AWS umbrella. However, all models are delivered only through AWS services, limiting portability and usage across environments.
    • Azure: Connects to Azure OpenAI, Foundry, and popular external providers, but orchestration is Azure-first and endpoint-by-endpoint. In many deployments, non-OpenAI models are integrated through passthrough, which forwards requests with limited governance, visibility, and cost control.

    API runtime infrastructure and the API producer experience

    To be successful with LLM initiatives, organizations will need more than just an AI gateway. Customers will need a comprehensive control plane that provides the ability to automatically onboard new teams and their infrastructure, instantly deploy new LLMs with plugins that go beyond just the AI use cases, and also have traditional API management controls for access tiers, authorization, authentication and more. Additionally, they will need a way to document which AI providers and models are available for developers to use, with RBAC in place to restrict which developers access.

    In addition to the Kong AI Gateway, the Kong Konnect API platform is optimized for managing AI traffic at scale by:

    1. Enabling centralized access, security, federated governance and visibility.
    2. Implementing usage tracking, cost allocation, and budgeting controls per team or project
    3. Supporting scalability & self-service enablement
    4. Providing deployment flexibility across any environment

    Enterprise-readiness

    Beyond feature comparisons, it’s important to recognize a broader challenge in the market. Many vendors are either early-stage with small teams, or mature in traditional API offerings but only beginning to build out their AI capabilities. While they may bring useful features, enterprises require a partner with the proven scale, enterprise support, and engineering experience to keep up with fast-changing AI needs. This is where mature platforms with a unified API + AI approach stand apart—offering both innovation and the stability required for long-term enterprise adoption.

    All comparative statements are based on our best interpretation of public-facing collateral, research, and word-of-mouth information. If you notice any inaccuracies and want to submit a correction request, please reach out to hello@konghq.com.

    Kong Konnect: The API platform that powers your AI innovation

    Many AI gateways only focus on proxying requests, leaving enterprises without the governance or scale they need. Kong takes it a step further by extending its proven API platform into the AI domain. By choosing Kong, organizations every day are able to securely scale multi-model adoption, enforce cost and compliance policies, and accelerate the rollout of AI-powered products.