Best Self-Hosted Kong AI Gateway Alternatives in 2026

Why Look for Kong AI Gateway Alternatives?

Kong AI Gateway is an API gateway for managing and securing AI model endpoints with rate limiting and authentication.

Self-hosted alternatives give you full data ownership, predictable costs, and zero vendor lock-in. You run the software on your own infrastructure and control everything.

4 Best Open-Source Alternatives to Kong AI Gateway

Portkey AI Gateway

Comprehensive AI platform with gateway, observability, guardrails, and prompt management. Access 1,600+ LLMs via unified API with enterprise-grade security. — 10,921 GitHub stars. Licensed under MIT.

Read full Portkey AI Gateway review

Envoy AI Gateway

Open source gateway built on Envoy for routing application traffic to GenAI services. Supports 16+ LLM providers including OpenAI, Anthropic, AWS Bedrock. — 1,433 GitHub stars. Licensed under Apache-2.0.

Read full Envoy AI Gateway review

LLM Gateway

Route, manage, and analyze LLM requests across multiple providers with one API. Compatible with OpenAI format, includes usage analytics and performance monitoring. — 980 GitHub stars. Licensed under MIT.

Read full LLM Gateway review

Itzam

Simple AI integration platform that manages prompts, models, and billing across 30+ AI providers. Switch models instantly with hot-swap functionality. — 61 GitHub stars. Licensed under Open Source.

Read full Itzam review

Why Self-Host Instead of Kong AI Gateway?

• Data ownership. Your data stays on your server, not on Kong AI Gateway’s infrastructure.
• Predictable costs. Pay a fixed VPS cost instead of growing per-user or per-usage fees.
• No vendor lock-in. Export and migrate your data anytime. You control the database.
• GDPR and compliance. Hosting your own tools simplifies data residency and compliance requirements.