LiteLLM alternatives, compared on where the licence line falls

Maxim AI's Go gateway, built for low overhead and simple deployment.

• Apache-2.0 with no enterprise directory, 7,675 GitHub stars (August 2026)
• Docker, Kubernetes or a single Go binary
• Claims under 100 microseconds of overhead at 5,000 requests per second
• OSS tier free forever, Enterprise custom pricing

Best for: Teams where raw proxy overhead is the binding constraint, or where the OSS tier genuinely covers the requirement.

Watch out: Guardrails, Cluster Mode for high availability, adaptive load balancing, RBAC, audit logs, log export and SSO are all Enterprise. High availability being paid makes the free build closer to a development gateway.

AI plugins on top of Kong Gateway, the Apache-2.0 API gateway with years of production hardening.

• Core Kong Gateway is Apache-2.0, 44,059 GitHub stars (August 2026)
• Six AI plugins free, seventeen require an AI Gateway Enterprise licence
• Konnect Plus includes five proxied LLMs, then $100 per month per model
• Runs self-hosted, hybrid, DB-less and on Kubernetes

Best for: Teams already running Kong for their APIs, where AI traffic becomes another route rather than another system.

Watch out: Semantic caching, advanced rate limiting and every guardrail plugin are enterprise-only. Kong has also stated that Gateway 3.18 makes AI plugins opt-in rather than bundled.

An open source gateway and observability platform with a very low-friction integration.

• Apache-2.0 with no enterprise directory, 6,116 GitHub stars (August 2026)
• Maintenance mode since Mintlify's acquisition announced 3 March 2026; security updates, bug fixes and new models still ship
• Hobby free with 10,000 requests, Pro $79/month, Team $799/month
• A base URL change plus one auth header

Best for: Teams where observability plus routing is the whole problem and the hosted tiers suit them.

Watch out: Both Helicone and Mintlify describe it as running in maintenance mode after the March 2026 acquisition, which constrains new feature work. Supported on-prem deployment sits under Enterprise, and SOC 2 and HIPAA compliance sit on Team at $799 per month.

A hosted aggregator giving access to the widest model catalogue available behind one key.

• Not open source, no self-hosting option documented
• Passes inference through without markup
• 5.5% fee on credit purchases via Stripe with a $0.80 minimum, or 5% via crypto
• Bring-your-own-keys free to $25,000 monthly list price, then 5%

Best for: Evaluation and experimentation, where trying twelve models this week matters more than where traffic goes.

Watch out: Prompts and responses transit OpenRouter's infrastructure. If a data residency constraint is why you are shopping, this is not a candidate.

A Cloudflare platform service providing analytics, caching, rate limiting and fallback.

• Not open source, no self-hosting option
• Available on all Cloudflare plans, including free
• Caching served from Cloudflare's edge rather than the model provider
• One line of code to integrate

Best for: Teams already on Cloudflare with no data residency constraint. Hard to beat on price and operational burden.

Watch out: Scope stops at the request boundary, and traffic traverses Cloudflare.

A gateway that ships as part of a control plane covering the agent runtime, sandboxes, memory and evaluations.

• Apache-2.0 across the repository, with no separately licensed directory
• Virtual keys, budgets, per-tenant limits, guardrails and clustering in the free build
• Starter $0, Build $20/month, Scale $100/month (August 2026)
• Self-hosted with Docker or Kubernetes at any tier

Best for: Teams who hit LiteLLM's enterprise line and also need agent execution, sandboxes or evaluations in the same place.

Watch out: Provider coverage is narrower than LiteLLM's, and the community is much smaller. If routing is your only problem, a dedicated gateway is the better-sized tool.