Best Kong AI Gateway Alternatives in 2026

DeepInfra is a low-cost, OpenAI-compatible inference API for 150+ open models, processing trillions of tokens a week on its own GPU stack. It is among the cheapest providers, with documented price-stability and support trade-offs to weigh.

Arize Phoenix is an open-source, OpenTelemetry-native observability and evaluation platform for LLM apps and agents. It traces every call, scores it with 50+ built-in evaluators, and self-hosts for free, which makes it the standard pick for vendor-neutral teams.

Composio is a managed tool-integration and auth layer that lets AI agents take real actions across 1,000+ apps without hand-rolling OAuth. With broad coverage, framework support, and the Rube MCP server, it favors fast prototyping over enterprise identity governance.

Braintrust is an eval-first observability platform for teams shipping LLM products, wiring tracing, datasets, scorers, and CI/CD quality gates into one workflow. Used by OpenAI, Stripe, and Notion, it is premium and proprietary, with a steep jump from free to paid.

Opik is Comet's open-source (Apache 2.0) LLM observability and evaluation platform: tracing, 30+ judge metrics, real-time guardrails, and a distinctive automated agent optimizer. Free to self-host with a $19/month cloud tier, it undercuts the premium eval platforms.

Baseten is a managed inference platform for deploying custom and fine-tuned AI models to production as autoscaling APIs. With Truss packaging, Chains pipelines, and HIPAA compliance, it targets ML teams shipping their own models, and it is backed by an NVIDIA-led 2026 round.

LiteLLM is an open-source AI gateway by BerriAI (YC W23) that translates 100+ LLM provider APIs into a single OpenAI-compatible endpoint. Self-host the proxy server to route across OpenAI, Anthropic, Bedrock, and more with spend tracking, rate limiting, and fallback routing built in.

SiliconFlow is a China-based inference platform offering one OpenAI-compatible API to 200+ models, including the DeepSeek, Qwen, GLM, and Kimi families. It is cheap and broad, but China data residency and a real-name verification requirement make it a careful choice for Western teams.

Nebius is a Nasdaq-listed AI cloud offering large-scale NVIDIA GPU compute plus the Token Factory inference API for open models. EU data residency, enterprise governance, and an NVIDIA investment make it a serious option for training and production inference.

kie.ai is a generative-media API aggregator that puts dozens of video, image, and audio models behind one key and one credit balance. It trades official-grade reliability for low pay-as-you-go pricing, which makes it popular for automated content pipelines and multi-model prototyping.