Bifrost is a high-performance AI gateway built from scratch in Go by the Maxim AI team. It unifies access to over 15 LLM providers — including OpenAI, Anthropic, AWS Bedrock, and Google Vertex — through a single OpenAI-compatible API endpoint. In sustained benchmarks at 5,000 requests per second, Bifrost adds only 11 microseconds of overhead per request, making it roughly 50 times faster than LiteLLM.
The gateway provides automatic failover with circuit breakers, intelligent load balancing, and semantic caching for reduced latency and cost. A key differentiator is its dual role as both an MCP client and MCP server, allowing it to function as a full MCP gateway in addition to standard LLM proxy duties. It supports over 1,000 AI models across providers through a unified interface.
Bifrost can be deployed in seconds via npx for quick testing or as a production-ready Docker container for self-hosted environments. Licensed under Apache 2.0, it offers a self-hostable alternative to managed gateway services like Portkey, with particular appeal for teams that need enterprise-grade reliability and performance without vendor lock-in.
