Bifrost vs TensorZero
Bifrost
getmaxim.ai
TensorZero
tensorzero.comSide by side
| Figure | Bifrost | TensorZero |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | — |
| Open source | Yes | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | — |
| macOS | Yes | — |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 2 | 1 |
| Spec score · LLM Gateway Software | 9.0 (#2) | 8.0 (#13) |
| Spec score · LLM gateways | 9.0 (#4) | 8.6 (#7) |
| Deployment | Bifrost can run as a self-hosted binary or through npx, Docker and Kubernetes, including private-cloud and disconnected environments. | The gateway can be deployed with Docker, Docker Compose, Kubernetes using a reference Helm chart, or built from source with Cargo. |
| Observability | Built-in observability includes OpenTelemetry support and a dashboard for request monitoring. | TensorZero can store inference and feedback data for observability, optimization, evaluations, and experimentation in Postgres or ClickHouse. |
| Product | Bifrost is an enterprise AI gateway and control plane for routing, governing, and securing AI traffic, including LLM calls, MCP tools, and agents. | TensorZero is an open-source platform that combines an LLM gateway, observability, evaluation, optimization, and experimentation. |
| Security | The security documentation describes Snyk dependency and code scanning, CodeQL analysis, Docker image scanning, and hardened non-root production containers. | TensorZero's privacy policy says it uses physical, technical, organizational, and administrative security measures to protect personal data. |
| Support | OSS includes documentation, community, and self-management support, while Enterprise offers SLA-backed support and direct access to engineers. | The project README directs users to Slack or Discord and offers work teams a Slack or Teams channel by email. |
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.
TensorZero
TensorZero is a free, open-source stack that brings together an LLM gateway, observability, optimization, evaluation, and experimentation. Its gateway provides a unified API for model providers and supports routing, retries, fallbacks, prompt templates, schemas, multi-step workflows, and traffic routing for A/B tests. Documented integrations include Anthropic, AWS Bedrock, Azure, Google, OpenAI, OpenRouter, Together AI, vLLM, xAI, and OpenAI-compatible endpoints. Inference and feedback data go to the database you configure, where they can be queried with SQL; feedback can be tied to individual inferences or episodes. The gateway and UI can run through Docker, Docker Compose, Kubernetes and Helm, or a source build. API key authentication is available for gateway endpoints other than status and health checks. The project is available on GitHub, but is no longer maintained; its repository is archived and read-only. TensorZero is self-hosted and licensed under Apache 2.0. It collects pseudonymous aggregate usage analytics, excluding application data and inference inputs and outputs, with an option to disable collection.