Our take
Activeregular commits and releases- Activity
- 90
- Community
- 88
- Issues
- 62
- Pull requests
- 54
- Releases more often than 93% of the projects we track
- Merges more pull requests than 87% of the projects we track
- More contributors than 78% of the projects we track
Bifrost is an actively maintained Go gateway with a broad feature set for teams that want provider flexibility and operational controls behind one API.
Good fit if
- You need an OpenAI-compatible gateway for multiple model providers, with routing and failover.
- Your team wants MCP support or centralized usage controls such as budgets and virtual keys.
- You can work with a Go-based project under the Apache-2.0 license.
Look elsewhere if
- You only need a direct integration with one provider and do not need gateway-level routing or governance.
- You need enterprise capabilities such as clustering, adaptive load balancing or guardrails without an enterprise deployment.
- Your stack requires a gateway built in a different language and cannot use an HTTP service boundary.
All health signals
| Last commit | 2026-11-13 (today) |
|---|---|
| Commits, last 90 days | 100+ |
| Releases, last 12 months | 100+ (latest transports/v2.5.1, 2026-11-10) |
| Contributors | 100+ (top contributor: 32% of commits) |
| Issues closed, last 90 days | 6+ (typically closed in 2 days) |
| Pull requests merged, last 90 days | 81 (typically merged in 2 days) |
| Project age | 20 months |
Checked on 2026-11-13 with the GitHub API.
Overview
Bifrost is a high-performance AI gateway built in Go. It gives applications one OpenAI-compatible API for accessing models from multiple providers, helping teams route requests and add reliability and governance without integrating each provider separately.
The project also frames itself as an MCP and agent gateway: it can connect model requests to external tools and supports agent-oriented workflows. It can run as an HTTP gateway with a web interface or be embedded through its Go SDK.
Key Features
- OpenAI-compatible API across multiple model providers, with drop-in integration paths for existing SDKs.
- Automatic fallbacks and load balancing across models, providers and API keys.
- MCP support for connecting models to external tools.
- Semantic caching to reuse responses based on similarity.
- Governance features including virtual keys, usage tracking, rate limits and budgets.
- Observability through metrics, tracing, logging and a web interface.
- Plugin architecture for extending gateway behavior.
Use Cases
- Platform teams can give several services a common API for models from different providers.
- Production AI applications can route around provider or model failures using fallbacks and load balancing.
- Teams building tool-using assistants can use the gateway's MCP support to connect models with external tools.
- Organizations managing AI spend can apply virtual keys, usage limits and budgets across teams or customers.
- Go developers can embed the gateway's SDK directly when an HTTP service boundary is not needed.
What you need
Detected in the repository
- Go (main language on GitHub)
- A test suite and automated checks on GitHub Actions
License in plain words
Apache-2.0permissive
- Commercial use: yes
- Modify and redistribute: yes
- You must keep: the license, the NOTICE file and a note of your changes
- Share your changes: no
- Includes an explicit patent grant from the contributors:
A summary, not legal advice: the LICENSE file is what applies.
Getting Started
Start the gateway with NPX:
npx -y @maximhq/bifrost
Then open http://localhost:8080 to configure it. See the README and gateway setup guide for configuration and deployment details.
Alternatives
- kong: Kong is a broader API gateway for services as well as LLMs and MCP, while Bifrost focuses on AI model routing.
- a3m-router: A3M Router uses task-based Jev System One routing and optional parallel ensembles, rather than Bifrost's general gateway features.
- inference-gateway: Inference Gateway emphasizes cloud-native deployment and integrations such as A2A, guardrails, and OpenTelemetry.
- freellmapi: FreeLLMAPI focuses on combining free provider accounts, quota tracking, and retries for personal experimentation.
| Project | Language | License | Stars | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| bifrost | Go | Apache-2.0 | 9.5k | Active |
| kong | Lua | Apache-2.0 | 44.3k | Active |
| a3m-router | TypeScript | MIT | 17 | New |
| inference-gateway | Go | Apache-2.0 | 215 | Active |
| freellmapi | TypeScript | MIT | 30.3k | New |
Considerations
Bifrost is active, with recent commits and releases, and contributions from at least 100 contributors; activity is not concentrated in one person. The measured issue data shows a short median time to close, though the repository also has a sizable open issue backlog. The README distinguishes enterprise deployments for some advanced features, so check availability and deployment terms for capabilities such as clustering and guardrails. The project uses the Apache-2.0 license.
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