AI · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to An open-source AI Gateway with integrated guardrails
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…
Portkey Gateway is an open-source AI gateway that routes requests across 200+ large language models while processing billions of tokens daily. Its latest update adds integrated guardrails that operate as middleware to… 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 2 we have checked on their own sites, 2 of them free or with a free tier. An open-source AI Gateway with integrated guardrails launched in 2024; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
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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 →
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LLM Gatewayfree tier▲296I 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 →
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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…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Hi HN, I'm Antoine Zambelli, AI Director at Texas Instruments. I built Forge, an open-source reliability layer for self-hosted LLM tool-calling. What it does: - Adds domain-and-tool-agnostic guardrails (retry nudges, step enforcement, error recovery, VRAM-aware context management) to local models running on consumer hardware - Takes an 8B model from ~53% to ~99% on multi-step agentic workflows without changing the model - just the system around it - Ships with an eval harness and interactive dashboard so you can reproduce every number I wanted to run a handful of always-on agentic systems…
May 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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FastRouter.aifree tier, from $199/mo▲364Route requests to the right LLM for cost, latency & quality
23d ago · fastrouter.ai · its alternatives →
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Context Gateway▲220We built an open-source proxy that sits between coding agents (Claude Code, OpenClaw, etc.) and the LLM, compressing tool outputs before they enter the context window. Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vFZ6MPrwjw#t=9s. Motivation: Agents are terrible at managing context. A single file read or grep can dump thousands of tokens into the window, most of it noise. This isn't just expensive — it actively degrades quality. Long-context benchmarks consistently show steep accuracy drops as context grows (OpenAI's GPT-5.4 eval goes from 97.2% at 32k to 36.6% at 1M…
Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Respan Gateway▲352One AI gateway with built-in observability and evals
Jun 2026 · respan.ai · its alternatives →
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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 →
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Arch▲314Hey 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 →
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Use AI models without managing keys or billing
Dec 2025 · docs.netlify.com · its alternatives →
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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 →
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Venn.ai▲336Delegate real work to AI agents with safety guardrails
Mar 2026 · venn.ai · its alternatives →
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TensorZero▲307Hi HN! We're Gabriel & Viraj, and we're excited to open source TensorZero. To be a little cheeky, TensorZero is an open-source platform that helps LLM applications graduate from API wrappers into defensible AI products. 1. Integrate our model gateway 2. Send metrics or feedback 3. Unlock compounding improvements in quality, cost, and latency It enables a data & learning flywheel for LLMs by unifying: • Inference: one API for all LLMs, with <1ms P99 overhead • Observability: inference & feedback → your database • Optimization: better prompts, models, inference strategies • Experimentation:…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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CtrlAI▲104Transparent proxy that secures AI agents with guardrails
Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Tokenwise▲143A smart LLM proxy that shows where you're overpaying
Jun 2026 · tokenwisehq.com · its alternatives →
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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 →
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Hi HN — we're the team behind Arch (https://github.com/katanemo/archgw), an open-source proxy for LLMs written in Rust. Today we're releasing Arch-Router (https://huggingface.co/katanemo/Arch-Router-1.5B), a 1.5B router model for preference-based routing, now integrated into the proxy. As teams integrate multiple LLMs - each with different strengths, styles, or cost/latency profiles — routing the right prompt to the right model becomes a critical part of the application design. But it's still an open problem. Most routing systems fall into two…
2025 · its alternatives →
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ModelRiver▲37Connect 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 →
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Local AI agent guardrails, budgets, & circuit breakers.
Jun 2026 · stackmint.ai · its alternatives →
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Hi HN, Matvey, Ildar, Joey, and Dominik here. If you're building LLM agents that use tools, you're probably worried about prompt injection attacks that can hijack those tools. We were too, and found that solutions like prompt-based filtering or secondary "guard" LLMs can be unreliable. Our thesis is that agent security should be handled at the network level between the agent and the LLM, just like a traditional web application firewall. So we built Archestra Platform: an open-source gateway that acts as a secure proxy for your AI agents. It's designed to be a deterministic firewall against…
2025 · archestra.ai · its alternatives →
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Guardrails and Provenance for enterprise AI control
Mar 2026 · console.agumbe.ai · its alternatives →
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Talk to multiple LLMs thru a unified API
2025 · ai-gateway.dev · 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 →