// the find
maximhq/bifrost
Fastest enterprise AI gateway (50x faster than LiteLLM) with adaptive load balancer, cluster mode, guardrails, 1000+ models support & <100 µs overhead at 5k RPS.
Bifrost is a Go-based AI gateway that proxies requests to 23+ LLM providers behind a single OpenAI-compatible API, with failover, load balancing, and semantic caching. It's aimed at teams that want to avoid vendor lock-in or need multi-key management without rewriting their application code. The drop-in replacement story — change one base_url — is the actual selling point.
The performance numbers are specific and credible: 11µs gateway overhead at 5k RPS on a t3.xlarge, with methodology documented and reproducible load test scripts in the repo. That's not marketing copy, that's a real benchmark. The plugin architecture is genuinely modular — governance, semantic caching, telemetry, and logging are separate Go modules, not baked into the core, so you pay only for what you include. The drop-in replacement pattern works cleanly: point your existing OpenAI or Anthropic SDK at localhost:8080 and nothing else changes. MCP gateway support is a legitimately useful addition for teams that want centralized tool management rather than configuring MCP per-client.
The important features are enterprise-only paywalled: adaptive load balancing, clustering, guardrails, and the MCP gateway all require a commercial license. What's left in the open-source tier is a smart proxy with basic round-robin and failover — useful but not the product being advertised. The '50x faster than LiteLLM' headline is not backed by a fair comparison in the README; LiteLLM is Python and serves a different use case, so the benchmark tells you more about Go vs Python than about gateway quality. Semantic caching requires standing up a vector store, and the docs don't say what happens when it's unavailable — silent fallthrough or hard failure matters in production. The config surface area is large enough that the CI has 10+ distinct config variants just to test combinations, which is a sign that operational complexity will bite you before you're done setting it up.