AI gateway comparison: the 6 best ranked (2026)

An AI gateway acts as a control layer through which all large language model (LLM) traffic passes before reaching a model provider, unifying access controls, quotas, cost tracking, and audit logging across providers. This facilitates production governance and developer routing by offering model routing and a unified API within the same core layer. AI gateways are categorized into infrastructure-first gateways, which extend existing API management systems to AI traffic, and LLM-native gateways, which focus on model access and provider abstraction. Key criteria for selecting an AI gateway include provider and model breadth, rate limiting, access control, governance, caching, cost tracking, audit logging, and actionable observability. Several AI gateways, such as Braintrust, Portkey, LiteLLM, Kong AI Gateway, SUSE AI Universal Proxy, and Cloudflare AI Gateway, offer varying capabilities depending on team needs, from production governance and observability to infrastructure control and edge caching. Braintrust Gateway stands out by integrating routed model requests into the release control process, enhancing evaluation workflows, and offering comprehensive logging and tracing capabilities, making it a preferred choice for teams focusing on production AI applications.