Bifrost vs Routerly
Bifrost
getmaxim.aiRouterly
routerly.aiSide by side
| Figure | Bifrost | Routerly |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | — |
| Open source | Yes | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | 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) | 7.8 (#16) |
| Spec score · LLM gateways | 9.0 (#4) | 8.0 (#14) |
| Budget controls | Teams can set spending limits and track costs by teams, projects and models. | Budgets can be set globally, per project, or per token, and can track cost, calls, or token usage over rolling or calendar windows. |
| Deployment | Bifrost can run as a self-hosted binary or through npx, Docker and Kubernetes, including private-cloud and disconnected environments. | The maker provides Docker and installer-based deployment, and says the installer supports Windows, macOS, and Linux. |
| 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 site describes Routerly as built for developers and use cases ranging from indie projects to enterprise deployments, including SaaS teams and local-first development. |
| Product | Bifrost is an enterprise AI gateway and control plane for routing, governing, and securing AI traffic, including LLM calls, MCP tools, and agents. | Routerly is a self-hosted gateway between applications and AI providers that routes requests, tracks costs, and enforces budgets. |
| Security | The security documentation describes Snyk dependency and code scanning, CodeQL analysis, Docker image scanning, and hardened non-root production containers. | The documentation says provider API keys and project tokens are AES-256 encrypted at rest, and user passwords are bcrypt-hashed. |
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.
Routerly
Routerly is a self-hosted gateway for directing application requests to AI providers, tracking usage costs, and applying budgets. Its routing engine can use up to nine configurable policies, covering model choice, cost, provider health and performance, capability and context, budgets, rate limits, and fairness. It supports OpenAI and Anthropic wire formats, including streaming, so compatible clients can connect by changing the base URL. Listed providers include OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini, Ollama, Mistral, Cohere, xAI, and custom HTTP endpoints. Per-token costs can use built-in pricing presets or custom model prices. Budgets can measure cost, calls, or token usage globally, per project, or per token, over rolling or calendar windows. Projects can have separate bearer tokens, model pools, routing configurations, and budget limits. Routerly stores configuration and usage records in JSON files without requiring an external database. It can be deployed with Docker or an installer. The self-hosted plan costs nothing, carries the AGPL-3.0 license, and adds no markup to API calls.