AI Gateway & LLM Security

An AI Gateway is a reverse proxy that sits between your applications and LLM providers such as OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google Gemini. It handles routing, authentication, rate limiting, cost control, and security enforcement in a single layer, so your teams interact with one unified endpoint regardless of which model they use.

Yes. KrakenD's AI Gateway features are built on top of the open source KrakenD API Gateway engine, freely available on GitHub. The Enterprise Edition adds advanced capabilities such as prompt caching, prompt guarding, and AI routing policies, with no usage-based or per-token fees.

Self-hosting keeps your prompts and responses inside your own infrastructure, which is essential for compliance with GDPR, HIPAA, or internal data governance policies. It also eliminates per-request cloud fees and vendor lock-in, giving your team full control over performance, configuration, and data residency.

The terms are used interchangeably in most contexts. An LLM Gateway typically refers to a component that routes and manages traffic specifically to large language model APIs. An AI Gateway is a broader concept that also covers agent communication, MCP server exposure, and governance across the full AI stack. KrakenD covers both.

Yes. KrakenD supports all major LLM providers out of the box, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini, Mistral, Cohere, and Alibaba Qwen. You can configure failover chains, load balancing, and cost-based routing across providers from a single declarative configuration file, with no code changes required.

KrakenD includes prompt and response guardrails that screen incoming requests for injection attempts and jailbreak patterns before they reach any model. You can also enforce JWT authentication, IP allowlists, and rate limits at the gateway level. Because everything runs inside your own perimeter, sensitive data never leaves your infrastructure.

Yes. KrakenD acts as an MCP Server, exposing your existing REST APIs as structured tools that AI agents and Copilot-style assistants can consume directly. The setup is fully declarative, with no custom code required.

Yes. KrakenD provides per-team quota enforcement, token usage tracking, audit logging, and prompt caching, giving platform and security teams the visibility and controls they need to govern AI usage across the organization. Everything runs inside your own environment, with no data leaving your perimeter.

LiteLLM is a Python library and lightweight proxy focused on providing a unified API surface across LLM providers, primarily for developer tooling. KrakenD is a production-grade API and AI Gateway: beyond LLM routing, it handles authentication, rate limiting, plugin extensibility, MCP exposure, and high-throughput API composition, all in a stateless compiled binary with no runtime dependencies.

OpenRouter is a managed cloud service that routes requests to hosted LLM APIs. KrakenD is a self-hosted alternative that provides the same multi-provider routing capabilities, with full control over your data, no per-token pricing, and the ability to add custom business logic through plugins. If data privacy or compliance is a requirement, self-hosting with KrakenD is the natural fit.

Vercel AI Gateway is designed for teams building on the Vercel platform, with a focus on JavaScript applications deployed in that ecosystem. KrakenD is platform-agnostic and deploys on any infrastructure (Kubernetes, Docker, bare metal, any cloud), supports backends in any language, and extends beyond LLM routing to cover the full API gateway and AI governance layer your organization needs.