Bifrost vs Envoy AI Gateway
Bifrost
getmaxim.aiEnvoy AI Gateway
aigateway.envoyproxy.ioSide by side
| Figure | Bifrost | Envoy AI Gateway |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | — |
| Open source | Yes | — |
| Web | Yes | — |
| Windows | Yes | — |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 2 | 1 |
| Spec score · LLM Gateway Software | 9.0 (#2) | 8.4 (#8) |
| Spec score · LLM gateways | 9.0 (#4) | 8.4 (#10) |
| Deployment | Bifrost can run as a self-hosted binary or through npx, Docker and Kubernetes, including private-cloud and disconnected environments. | The CLI can run locally on Linux and macOS, and production deployment uses Kubernetes with Envoy Gateway. |
| Intended users | The OSS edition is presented for developers, small teams, and self-managed deployments, while Enterprise is for teams running production AI systems at scale. | The documentation identifies teams sharing models or tools, seeking centralized credentials, quotas, usage attribution, or failover as likely users. |
| MCP gateway | Bifrost centralizes MCP tool connections, authentication, governance and policy enforcement. | The MCP gateway aggregates tools from multiple servers and supports tool routing, security policies, and observability. |
| Observability | Built-in observability includes OpenTelemetry support and a dashboard for request monitoring. | The CLI supports OpenTelemetry tracing and can record request and response details; the documentation describes configuration to hide input and output content. |
| Security | The security documentation describes Snyk dependency and code scanning, CodeQL analysis, Docker image scanning, and hardened non-root production containers. | The project describes upstream authentication for securing connections to AI services and says provider credentials can be kept out of application workloads. |
| Support | OSS includes documentation, community, and self-management support, while Enterprise offers SLA-backed support and direct access to engineers. | The project directs users to its community Discord and GitHub issues for help. |
Plans
In their own words
Bifrost
Bifrost is an AI gateway and control plane for directing, governing, and securing traffic involving model calls, MCP tools, and agents. It connects to more than 20 AI providers through one OpenAI-compatible API. Routing tools include weighted load balancing, retries, automatic provider failover, and semantic caching. Virtual keys let teams apply permissions, budgets, rate limits, and routing rules by consumer. Bifrost can connect with external MCP servers and present their tools to clients such as Claude Desktop. Its documented SDK integrations include OpenAI, Anthropic, Google GenAI, LiteLLM, and LangChain. Request monitoring, Prometheus metrics, and OpenTelemetry tracing integrations provide observability. The free OSS edition is for developers, small teams, and self-managed deployments; it can run via NPX, Docker, Kubernetes, or Go binary. Enterprise adds SSO, role-based access, audit logs, guardrails, vault integrations, and private VPC deployments. Enterprise pricing is custom, with a 14-day trial on an enterprise license.
Envoy AI Gateway
Envoy AI Gateway, now named Agent Router, is an open-source control plane for managing AI and agent traffic through Envoy. It provides an OpenAI-compatible API for hosted and self-hosted models and MCP servers, with integrations for providers including OpenAI, Azure OpenAI, Google Gemini, AWS Bedrock, Mistral, and Anthropic. Traffic controls include model virtualization, provider failover, token quotas, and usage-based rate limiting. Its MCP gateway supports server multiplexing, tool routing, OAuth authentication, and observability; InferencePool support adds routing and load balancing for inference endpoints. Credentials can be managed centrally, and supported short-lived credential flows include AWS Bedrock, Azure OpenAI, and GCP Vertex AI. The project describes metrics collection and monitoring for AI workloads. The free open-source project is listed at free. Its CLI supports local use on Linux and macOS; production Kubernetes deployment uses Envoy Gateway and requires compatible dependencies. The project uses the Apache 2.0 license and points users to Discord and GitHub issues for help.