Bifrost
Self-hosted Go gateway that routes LLM traffic across providers with failover, caching, and guardrails.
About
Maxim AI wrote Bifrost in Go to be the fastest self-hosted LLM gateway available, claiming under 100 microseconds of added overhead at 5,000 requests per second, with its own benchmarks putting it far ahead of LiteLLM. One OpenAI-compatible API fronts more than 1,000 models across 20 plus providers including OpenAI, Anthropic, AWS Bedrock, Google Vertex, and Azure, while adaptive load balancing, automatic failover, semantic caching, virtual keys with budget controls, and integrated guardrails handle the production concerns. A cluster mode distributes the gateway itself for high availability, MCP support lets routed agents execute tools, and observability hooks cover logging and tracing. It deploys as a Docker container or Go binary with a web UI, and a native Go SDK embeds it directly in services; enterprise features such as RBAC, audit logs, and compliance tooling form the commercial tier above the Apache-2.0 core. Launched in 2025, the repository has grown to roughly 6,900 GitHub stars among teams consolidating LLM traffic.
Should you use Bifrost?
Pick it when
Pick Bifrost when you route heavy LLM traffic through one self-hosted gateway and per-request overhead matters, or when your services are written in Go and you want to embed the gateway through its native SDK instead of a separate proxy.
Look elsewhere when
Skip it if you need RBAC, audit logs, or compliance tooling without paying, since those sit in the commercial tier. The speed claims come from the vendor's own benchmarks, and it launched in 2025, so it is younger than LiteLLM.
Alternatives to Bifrost
- LiteLLM
Python SDK plus proxy with spend tracking and a longer track record, though Bifrost's vendor benchmarks claim lower added latency.
- Portkey AI Gateway
MIT-licensed TypeScript gateway that starts with one npx command and ships 50 plus guardrails; its observability lives on a hosted platform.
- Helicone
Focused on logging, cost tracking, and caching for LLM calls rather than high-throughput routing, and simpler to adopt for visibility.
- OmniRoute
Aimed at keeping coding agents running across hundreds of providers with free-tier fallback, not production traffic for your own services.
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Details
- Category
- AI Deployment & MLOps
- Price
- Freemium
- Platform
- Local/Desktop
- Difficulty
- Intermediate (3/5)
- License
- Apache-2.0
- Added
- Jul 29, 2026