maximhq/bifrost
Bifrost is the fastest open-source AI gateway available, adding just 11 microseconds of internal overhead while proxying requests to over 1,000 LLM models across 15+ providers through a single OpenAI-compatible API. Built in Go by the Maxim team, it handles 5,000 requests per second with a 100% success rate and zero dropped connections — performance that is 50x faster than LiteLLM, with 9.5x higher throughput, 54x lower P99 latency, and 68% less memory consumption under identical load conditions. The gateway supports OpenAI, Anthropic, AWS Bedrock, Google Vertex AI, Azure OpenAI, Cerebras, Cohere, Mistral, Ollama, Groq, and more. Switching providers requires zero code changes because Bifrost exposes a unified OpenAI-compatible interface, making it a true drop-in replacement for existing SDKs. Automatic failover detects provider outages and reroutes traffic instantly, while intelligent load balancing distributes requests across endpoints based on real-time latency and availability. Enterprise governance features include virtual API keys, hierarchical budget controls with per-team and per-project spending limits, granular rate limiting, and SSO authentication via Google and GitHub. Semantic caching deduplicates similar prompts to cut costs and reduce median latency. The Model Context Protocol (MCP) integration enables external tool use directly through the gateway. Deployment is straightforward — a single Docker container or npx command launches Bifrost with a built-in web UI, native Prometheus metrics, and distributed tracing out of the box. Licensed under Apache 2.0 with 2.8K+ GitHub stars.
Why It Matters
AI teams running production workloads across multiple LLM providers face a compounding operations problem: each provider has its own SDK, authentication scheme, rate limits, and failure modes. Bifrost collapses that complexity into a single endpoint with sub-15-microsecond overhead, which means engineering teams can add or swap providers without touching application code. The enterprise governance layer — virtual keys, budgets, rate limits — solves the cost visibility gap that causes surprise bills when LLM usage scales. For platform teams evaluating LiteLLM or building custom proxy layers, Bifrost's Go-based architecture delivers dramatically better resource efficiency, making it viable to self-host the gateway without dedicating significant infrastructure budget to the proxy itself.