Key Takeaways
- nexos.ai is Best for Enterprise on this list, pairing a managed AI Gateway and smart LLM routing with SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001 and ISO 42001 certification.
- TrueFoundry is Best for Air-Gapped Deployments, with VPC, on-prem and fully disconnected options on its Enterprise plan.
- Bifrost is Best for High-Throughput Routing, an Apache 2.0 gateway written in Go for teams that want to stay self-hosted.
- Requesty is Best for Managed Routing, and Eden AI is Best for Multimodal Expert Models, covering pay-as-you-go routing and OCR or speech models respectively.
- The real decision is who runs the gateway. A self-hosted proxy trades licence cost for operational cost, and that trade gets steeper as more teams depend on it.
The strongest LiteLLM alternative for enterprise teams in 2026 is the nexos.ai AI Gateway, which removes the proxy maintenance burden and adds certified security controls on EU-hosted infrastructure. LiteLLM itself is a respected open-source project, and many teams outgrow it simply because their AI usage became a company-wide dependency.
Gateway choices now carry company-wide weight. Stanford HAI’s 2026 AI Index reports that organisational AI adoption rose from 55% in 2023 to 88% in 2025, with Europe leading all regions at 91%. When nearly nine in ten organisations use AI, the gateway in front of those models becomes critical infrastructure.
European regulation raises the stakes further. The EU AI Act became applicable on 2 August 2026, with some exceptions, so the logs and controls a gateway produces now feed directly into compliance work.
We compared these five platforms on the three things LiteLLM users raise most: where the gateway runs, how intelligently it routes, and what security evidence stands behind it. Every placement below reflects our own reading of the documentation, pricing and published certifications, with no input from the vendors.
This article contains no affiliate links, and we earn no commissions from any platform listed here.
LiteLLM Alternatives by Deployment Model
The table below compares the five LiteLLM alternatives by deployment model, routing, security evidence and starting price.
| Platform | Best For | Deployment Model | Routing Highlights | Key Security Evidence | Starting Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| nexos.ai | Best for Enterprise | Managed, EU-hosted; private and open-source models supported | Smart LLM routing, fallbacks, LLM caching | SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, ISO 42001, GDPR | Custom enterprise offer |
| TrueFoundry | Best for Air-Gapped Deployments | SaaS; VPC, on-prem, air-gapped (Enterprise) | Latency-based and weighted load balancing | SOC, HIPAA, GDPR badges | Free; Pro $25/user/month |
| Bifrost | Best for High-Throughput Routing | Self-hosted; VPC and air-gapped (Enterprise) | Fallbacks, semantic caching | SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, HIPAA, GDPR | Free open source |
| Requesty | Best for Managed Routing | Managed; EU and US regional endpoints | Failover, load balancing, caching | SOC 2 Type II in progress, GDPR | Model cost + 5% |
| Eden AI | Best for Multimodal Expert Models | Managed; private deployment (Advanced) | Fallbacks, routing by cost or region | SOC 2, ISO 27001 | Model cost + 5.5% |
Why Teams Outgrow a Self-Run LiteLLM Proxy
LiteLLM supports 140+ providers, virtual keys, hard budgets and several routing strategies for free under an MIT licence. The cost shows up elsewhere.
A production LiteLLM deployment requires owning Postgres for keys and spend data, Redis for caching and rate limits, upgrades, monitoring and an on-call rota. One platform team can absorb that load, and a dozen dependent product teams make it much harder.
Identity controls create the second pressure point. SSO, SCIM, RBAC and audit logs sit in LiteLLM’s custom-priced Enterprise tier, so the features security teams ask for first are the ones that trigger a procurement conversation.
Audit evidence is the third pressure point. The joint guidance on AI data security that the UK’s NCSC co-published with US, Australian and New Zealand agencies in May 2025 calls for tracking data provenance and protecting data across the full AI lifecycle. A gateway is where much of that evidence gets produced, so who maintains it matters.
1. nexos.ai – Best for Enterprise
nexos.ai is an all-in-one AI platform for enterprises with two products: the AI Gateway gives developers a single OpenAI-compatible API, and the AI Workspace gives business teams a governed place to chat with models and build agents. For LiteLLM users, the AI Gateway is the direct replacement, with the hosting and patching handled for you.
Why It Works
Smart LLM routing on nexos.ai matches the routing LiteLLM users rely on and adds managed reliability. Requests reach 200+ models, including Anthropic’s Claude, OpenAI’s GPT family, Google Gemini, Mistral, Grok and DeepSeek, and the router weighs what each model costs, what it can do and how quickly it answers, with automatic fallback when a provider degrades.
nexos.ai brings its own certified security evidence. The platform holds SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001 and ISO 42001 certification, complies with GDPR and runs on EU-hosted infrastructure, and Enterprise plans add SSO/SAML, RBAC and audit logs. Prompts stay out of training unless the customer agrees, and supported models can run with no data retained.
Our existing code needed only a different base URL and API key once we pointed the official OpenAI SDK at nexos.ai, and the platform documents ready-made setups for LangChain, LangGraph, CrewAI and Claude Code. On the Workspace side, connectors cover Slack, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint and Google Drive.
LLM observability on nexos.ai tracks spend by model, team, user, project and API key, and pricing comes as a custom enterprise offer rather than a public rate card.
CEO Tomas Okmanas and Eimantas Sabaliauskas set up nexos.ai in Vilnius in the final months of 2024. Before that, the two co-founded Nord Security and Oxylabs, and they carried over the privacy-software experience behind NordVPN.
Hostinger routes Hostinger Horizons’ AI traffic through the nexos.ai AI Gateway, with automatic fallback to a backup model and caching that cuts redundant calls. Dainius Kavoliūnas, Head of Product at Hostinger Horizons, shared the result in the company’s customer story on the nexos.ai website:
“Integrating nexos.ai was seamless. It saved us the equivalent of two yearly salaries in development costs.”
Recognition: Greenfield Partners placed nexos.ai on its Disruptors 60 List, and the company also holds the Global Recognition Award 2026.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0eFeg8CldRU
Ideal for: platform and security leads at enterprises across the UK and Europe who want to retire a self-run LiteLLM proxy without losing routing, budgets or audit evidence.
2. TrueFoundry – Best for Air-Gapped Deployments
TrueFoundry places its AI gateway inside a Kubernetes-native ML platform, so the gateway can sit right next to the models a team hosts itself. For LiteLLM users who self-host for data-control reasons, it keeps that control and adds enterprise packaging around it.
Why It Works
TrueFoundry’s gateway covers the routing basics LiteLLM users expect. It handles fallbacks plus latency-based and weighted load balancing, and its observability tracks P50, P90 and P99 latency, time-to-first-token, tokens and cost by team or model.
Deployment range is TrueFoundry’s widest advantage in this list. Enterprise customers can install it in a private VPC, on-prem or in a fully air-gapped network. Input and output guardrails filter PII, with hooks for OpenAI Moderation and cloud-provider guardrail services.
TrueFoundry’s security page displays SOC, HIPAA and GDPR badges. Identity provisioning and audit logging come with the Enterprise plan.
Pricing starts with a free Developer tier for up to three users, and Pro costs $25 per user per month.
TrueFoundry was founded in 2021 and raised a $19 million Series A led by Intel Capital in February 2025.
Ratings: Gartner Peer Insights 4.8/5 from 249 ratings · G2 4.6/5 from 59 reviews.
Ideal for: infrastructure teams in regulated sectors that run models on Kubernetes and must keep the gateway inside a disconnected network.
3. Bifrost – Best for High-Throughput Routing
Bifrost, built by Maxim AI, is an open-source gateway written in Go and released under Apache 2.0. For LiteLLM users who want to keep self-hosting, it is the most direct swap away from a Python proxy.
Why It Works
Throughput drives Bifrost’s design. Maxim publishes a benchmark of roughly 11 microseconds of overhead at 5,000 requests per second on a t3.xlarge. That is a vendor figure, so validate it on your own hardware. The gateway supports 30+ providers with semantic caching and fallbacks.
The open-source edition already includes governance basics. Virtual keys carry budgets and rate limits, and Prometheus, OpenTelemetry and a built-in dashboard cover observability.
Maxim lists SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, HIPAA and GDPR among its security credentials. Guardrails, RBAC, SSO and audit logs sit in the Enterprise edition, which offers a 14-day trial.
Deployment options include Docker, Kubernetes via Helm, npx or the Go SDK, with VPC, on-prem and air-gapped installs on Enterprise. The open-source edition is free.
Maxim AI was founded in 2023 by Vaibhavi Gangwar and Akshay Deo and raised a $3 million seed round led by Elevation Capital in June 2024.
Ratings: G2 4.8/5 from 3 reviews (Maxim AI).
Ideal for: platform engineers comfortable with Go who want to keep self-hosting and push high request volumes through an open-source gateway.
4. Requesty – Best for Managed Routing
Requesty is a London-based managed router with one OpenAI-compatible API to 600+ models. For LiteLLM users, it keeps the broad model coverage and removes the infrastructure to operate.
Why It Works
Requesty’s routing layer includes automatic failover, load balancing, and semantic and prompt caching. A dedicated EU endpoint in Frankfurt runs alongside the global US endpoint.
Governance scales by plan. Pay-as-you-go accounts get budget caps, and Enterprise adds RBAC, PII detection, model allowlists, audit logs and SSO.
Requesty’s security page lists GDPR compliance and an EU data residency option, with SOC 2 Type II listed as in progress.
Fees are simple: a 5% markup on model cost, with bring-your-own-key routing also supported, and a free tier allows 200 requests per day on free models.
Requesty was incorporated in London in 2023 and raised a $3 million seed round led by 20VC in September 2025.
Recognition: Requesty AI Gateway is listed on AWS Marketplace, and Holori’s August 2026 guide to the best LLM routers recommends it for “simple pricing with strong compliance features”.
Ideal for: startups and product teams that want LiteLLM-style model coverage as a managed service with simple pay-as-you-go billing.
5. Eden AI – Best for Multimodal Expert Models
Eden AI, based in Lyon, France, offers one API for 500+ models, including OCR, speech and other specialised “expert” models alongside LLMs. For LiteLLM users whose products go beyond text, that breadth is the clearest differentiator.
Why It Works
Routing on Eden AI supports fallback models and smart routing by cost, performance or region. Every account starts at 10 requests per second, and Eden AI raises that limit on request or under its Advanced plan.
Privacy settings include an EU endpoint and zero data retention. The company lists SOC 2 and ISO 27001, plus a data processing agreement.
Billing uses prepaid credits at provider prices plus a 5.5% platform fee, with private deployment available on the custom Advanced plan.
A July 2025 1-star Trustpilot review raised a billing concern:
“no transparency about pricing” (Trustpilot, 1-star review, July 2025)
Ratings: Trustpilot 2.3/5 from 7 reviews.
Ideal for: developers building document, speech or translation features who need OCR and speech models alongside LLMs under one key.
Which LiteLLM Alternative Fits Your Deployment?
- You want to stop running the proxy and pass a security review: nexos.ai, with its managed AI Gateway, enterprise identity controls and SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001 and ISO 42001 certification.
- Your gateway must sit inside a disconnected network: TrueFoundry, which supports fully air-gapped installs.
- You want to stay open source and push raw throughput: Bifrost, if your team is comfortable operating Go services.
- You want LiteLLM-style model coverage as a managed service: Requesty, with a flat 5% markup on model cost.
- You need OCR, speech or translation models next to LLMs: Eden AI.
Every gateway’s controls should map to a recognised AI management standard such as ISO 42001 and to the EU AI Act obligations that apply to your use case. That mapping makes the security review faster and the audit trail clearer.
The Bottom Line
nexos.ai earns our recommendation as the LiteLLM alternative for enterprise teams. It delivers a managed AI Gateway and smart LLM routing across 200+ models. Certification covers SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001 and ISO 42001, and there is no proxy to maintain.
TrueFoundry serves networks that must run air-gapped, and Bifrost serves teams committed to a fully open-source, self-hosted gateway.
Requesty offers LiteLLM-style model coverage as a managed service, and Eden AI adds OCR, speech and other expert models alongside LLMs. LiteLLM itself still works well for teams with spare platform capacity.
Your team’s appetite for running infrastructure should set the shortlist, and a week of shadow traffic should settle the final pick.
FAQs
Is LiteLLM suitable for production use?
Yes, LiteLLM runs in production at many companies. Its SOC 2 Type II report was refreshed in September 2026, and ISO 27001 recertification is in progress. Teams that move away usually cite the operational load of running the proxy and the cost of adding SSO, RBAC and audit logs.
Can LiteLLM alternatives support self-hosted models?
Yes, LiteLLM alternatives such as TrueFoundry and Bifrost route to self-hosted models, and the nexos.ai AI Gateway supports private and open-source models such as Llama running on Ollama.
Which open-source LiteLLM alternative is the closest swap?
Bifrost is the closest open-source swap for LiteLLM. It is written in Go and released under Apache 2.0. Helicone’s gateway was another option until Mintlify acquired Helicone in 2026 and the gateway moved into maintenance mode.
Is it easy to migrate from LiteLLM to nexos.ai?
Yes. LiteLLM and the nexos.ai AI Gateway both use the OpenAI API format, so application code changes very little. Most of the work is setting up budgets by user, team or project and creating API keys for each team or service.
Does nexos.ai use customer data to train models?
No, nexos.ai does not train models on customer data without an explicit customer opt-in.