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AI · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to A lightweight AI gateway to 100+ models, in TS

We are Rohit & Ayush, we created Portkey this year March to help tackle some challenges we had seen while building apps based on GPT3, 3.5, 4, and the DevOps principles we brought to the scene to help tackle them. We believe, a solid, performant, and reliable gateway lays the foundation to help build the next level of LLM apps. It decreases excessive reliance on any one company and takes the focus back to building instead of spending time fixing the nitty gritties of different providers and making them work together. Features: Blazing fast (9.9x faster) with a tiny footprint (~45kb…

Portkey is a lightweight TypeScript gateway that connects applications to over 100 AI models from multiple providers. It offers fast performance with a small footprint and includes load balancing, automatic failover… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Prices are shown for the 3 we have checked on their own sites, 3 of them free or with a free tier. A lightweight AI gateway to 100+ models, in TS launched in 2024; newer entries below may have overtaken it.

  1. 1

    Hi HN, I've been developing Portkey Gateway, an open-source AI gateway that's now processing billions of tokens daily across 200+ LLMs. Today, we're launching a significant update: integrated Guardrails at the gateway level. Key technical features: 1. Guardrails as middleware: We've implemented a hooks architecture that allows guardrails to act as middleware in the request/response flow. This enables real-time LLM output evaluation and transformation. 2. Flexible orchestration: The gateway can now route requests based on guardrail verdicts. This allows for complex logic like fallbacks…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  2. 2

    Many teams connecting LLMs to external tools eventually encounter the same architectural issue: as more tools and agents are added, the integration pattern becomes an N×M mesh of direct connections. Each agent implements its own auth, retries, rate limiting, and logging; each tool needs credentials distributed to multiple places and observability becomes fragmented. We built LLM gateway with this goal to provide a single place to manage authentication, authorization, routing, and observability for MCP servers, with a path toward a more general agent-gateway architecture in the future. The…

    Dec 2025 · truefoundry.com · its alternatives →

  3. 3
    LLM Gatewayfree tier▲286

    I built an OpenAI-compatible LLM gateway that routes requests to OpenAI, Anthropic, Ollama, vLLM, llama-server, SGLang... anything that speaks /v1/chat/completions. Single Go binary, one YAML config file, no infrastructure. It does the things you'd expect from this kind of gateway... semantic routing via a three-layer cascade (keyword heuristics, embedding similarity, LLM classifier) that picks the best model when clients omit the model field, weighted round-robin load balancing across local inference servers with health checks and failover. The part I think is most…

    2025 · llmgateway.io · its alternatives →

  4. 4
    Portia AI▲535

    Secure AI agents with tools, auth, and smart control

    2025 · rezonant.app · its alternatives →

  5. 5

    Hi, I’m Jakub, a solo founder based in Warsaw. I’ve been building GoModel since December with a couple of contributors. It's an open-source AI gateway that sits between your app and model providers like OpenAI, Anthropic or others. I built it for my startup to solve a few problems: - track AI usage and cost per client or team - switch models without changing app code - debug request flows more easily - reduce AI spendings with exact and semantic caching How is it different? - ~17MB docker image - LiteLLM's image is more than 44x bigger ("docker.litellm.ai/berriai/litellm:latest" ~…

    Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  6. 6
    SimplAIfree tier, from $5/mo▲589

    Hey HN, I've been building SimplAI for the past several months — it's a platform for building, testing, and deploying LLM-powered agents and multi-step workflows. The problem I kept running into: spinning up an AI agent pipeline means stitching together prompt management, tool calling, memory, evals, and deployment — often from scratch every time. SimplAI tries to be the layer that handles all of that so you can focus on what your agent actually does. What it does: - Visual + code-first workflow builder for chaining LLM calls, tools, and APIs - Built-in prompt versioning and A/B testing…

    2025 · simplai.ai · its alternatives →

  7. 7

    Hi HN, we built an open source model gateway. It's a single place to manage our own self hosted, frontier, and open source models in one place. It’s is rust native, built for concurrency, and implements all the config quirks across models and providers (streaming formats, tool calls, model parameters, rate limits, and different error behavior). The gateway adds under 1 ms for BYOK requests and under 2 ms when Experiential supplies the provider key. It has every major inference provider, and 1000+ models refreshed daily via a codex agent that opens a PR. Compared to other similar projects…

    Aug 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  8. 8

    5000+ MCP servers AI tools, 1 line of code

    2025 · toolsdk.ai · its alternatives →

  9. 9
    Arch▲314

    Hey HN — I’m Adil from Katanemo (with Salman, Shuguang, and Meiyu) We previously shared an early version of this project as ArchGW. Based on customer feedback, the scope expanded from “LLM routing and model access” into something broader: delivery infrastructure for agentic applications. We renamed it to Plano and reworked the architecture accordingly. The problem On-the-ground AI practitioners will tell you that calling an LLM is not the hard part. The really hard part is delivering agentic applications to production quickly and reliably, then iterating without rewriting system code every…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  10. 10

    Chat with AI using your API keys. Pay only for what you use. ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and other LLMs supported. The best chat LLM frontend UI for all AI models.

    2023 · typingmind.com · its alternatives →

  11. 11
    Oxlo.ai▲378

    Scale across AI models without scaling your bill

    Jun 2026 · oxcode.ai · its alternatives →

  12. 12
    FastRouter.aifree tier, from $199/mo▲364

    Route requests to the right LLM for cost, latency & quality

    23d ago · fastrouter.ai · its alternatives →

  13. 13

    Use AI models without managing keys or billing

    Dec 2025 · docs.netlify.com · its alternatives →

  14. 14

    One AI gateway with built-in observability and evals

    Jun 2026 · respan.ai · its alternatives →

  15. 15

    Hey HN, We just recently launched Forge – an AI model API platform that lets you access and call AI models from multiple providers in one place. Find it on our website: https://tensorblock.co/forge Some key features: Unified API Key – Store multiple provider API keys and access all with a single Forge API key. OpenAI API Compatible – Drop-in replacement for any application that uses OpenAI’s API. Advanced Security – Strong Encryption for API keys with JWT-based authentication. Client Management – Easy key and user management via included command-line interface. Open-source –…

    2025 · tensorblock.co · its alternatives →

  16. 16

    One private gateway for every AI model

    Aug 2026 · ngrok.ai · its alternatives →

  17. 17
    traceAI▲273

    Open-source LLM tracing that speaks GenAI, not HTTP.

    Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  18. 18
    Opper AI▲229

    Hey HN! After the Car Wash Test post got quite a big discussion going (400+ comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47128138), I spent the past few weeks building a tool so anyone can run these kinds of questions and get structured results. No signup and free to use. You type a question, define answer options, pick up to 50 models at a time from a pool of 200+, and they all answer independently under identical conditions. No system prompt, structured output, same setup for every model. You can also run a debate round where models see each other's reasoning and get a…

    Jul 2026 · opper.ai · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    Hey HN, We've been building a multi-model API for LLMs called OpenRouter since we launched the Window AI extension in April this year [0]. The events of the last week make it clear the LLM landscape is unpredictable, so LLM aggregators are picking up interest. Unlike others, we're making a router on top of a public, explorable dataset. We recently built a way to rank and visualize this data, including the token counts we see going to and from different models, both open-sourced (like Llama, Mistral, finetunes, and variants) and closed-sourced (OpenAI, Anthropic). The API supports - 50+…

    Apr 2026 · openrouter.ai · its alternatives →

  20. 20

    Connect once to every major AI model. Run AI workflows in the background while your backend controls what AI sees.

    Jan 2026 · modelriver.com · its alternatives →

  21. 21

    We built any-llm because we needed a lightweight router for LLM providers with minimal overhead. Switching between models is just a string change : update "openai/gpt-4" to "anthropic/claude-3" and you're done. It uses official provider SDKs when available, which helps since providers handle their own compatibility updates. No proxy or gateway service needed either, so getting started is pretty straightforward - just pip install and import. Currently supports 20+ providers including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Mistral, and AWS Bedrock. Would love to hear what you think!

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  22. 22
    Code Mode▲144

    I’ve been testing a simple idea inspired by Apple/Cloudflare/Anthropic: LLMs are far better at writing a small program than coordinating multiple tool calls. So instead of giving the model 10+ tools, I exposed one: a TypeScript sandbox with access to the same interfaces. The model writes a script → it runs once → done. What changed - +68% reduction in token use - No multi-step drift or retries - Local models (Llama 3.1 8B / Phi-3) became much more reliable Repo: https://github.com/universal-tool-calling-protocol/code-mode Curious whether others have seen…

    Nov 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  23. 23
    ADK-TS▲108

    Build smart, tool-using agents in just one line

    2025 · adk.iqai.com · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    Your Gateway to Multiple AI Models

    2025 · typethinkai.com · its alternatives →

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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →