9 Best AI Gateways in 2026: Bifrost, Portkey, LiteLLM, Kong and 5 More Ranked
An AI gateway is a control layer between your application and model providers. It gives every service one API for many models. It also centralizes routing, retries, failover, caching, budgets and logs. This guide presents the best AI gateways for production teams in 2026. The market moved fast this year. Palo Alto Networks closed its acquisition of Portkey on May 29. Mintlify acquired Helicone , which now runs in maintenance mode. LiteLLM survived a PyPI supply chain compromise in March....
An AI gateway is a control layer between your application and model providers. It gives every service one API for many models. It also centralizes routing, retries, failover, caching, budgets and logs. This guide presents the best AI gateways for production teams in 2026. The market moved fast this year. Palo Alto Networks closed its acquisition of Portkey on May 29. Mintlify acquired Helicone , which now runs in maintenance mode. LiteLLM survived a PyPI supply chain compromise in March....