8 Best Kong Alternatives in 2026 (Open Source)
Kong — 🦍 The API and AI Gateway. Combines traditional API gateway functionality with dedicated LLM and MCP traffic management and security for agentic systems.
These 8 open-source tools do the same job. They are ordered by how closely they match Kong, with live GitHub data so you can see which projects are actively maintained.
| Tool | GitHub stars | Stars / 30d | Last commit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kong(original) | 44.2k | +3,685 | 2026-09-28 |
| Tyk API Gateway | 10.8k | +903 | 2026-09-30 |
| AI Gateway | 13.1k | +328 | 2026-05-25 |
| LiteLLM | 59.9k | +3,008 | 2026-09-30 |
| Bifrost AI Gateway | 8.5k | +834 | 2026-09-30 |
| OmniRoute | 71.7k | +11,300 | 2026-09-30 |
| TensorZero | 11.7k | +90 | 2026-06-04 |
| helicone | 6.2k | +134 | 2026-09-16 |
| Casdoor | 14.5k | +1,208 | 2026-09-30 |
1. Tyk API Gateway
Open Source API and AI Gateway supporting REST, GraphQL, TCP, gRPC and MCP (Model Context Protocol)
What sets it apart: Combines traditional API gateway functionality with AI-specific MCP protocol support for agent tool integration.
Best for: Integrating AI agents with various backend services; Managing API traffic for agent deployments; Protocol translation for agent tool integration
2. AI Gateway
A blazing fast AI Gateway with integrated guardrails. Route to 200+ LLMs, 50+ AI Guardrails with 1 fast & friendly API.
What sets it apart: vs LiteLLM: production-focused with guardrails, caching, and MCP Gateway; vs OpenRouter: self-hostable with enterprise governance and conditional routing rather than just model access
Best for: Teams using multiple LLM providers needing unified routing; Production AI apps requiring reliability (retries/fallbacks); Organizations wanting centralized LLM cost and access control
3. LiteLLM
Python SDK, Proxy Server (AI Gateway) to call 100+ LLM APIs in OpenAI (or native) format, with cost tracking, guardrails, loadbalancing and logging. [Bedrock, Azure, OpenAI, VertexAI, Cohere, Anthropi
What sets it apart: Unlike OpenRouter (hosted-only routing), LiteLLM is self-hostable and provides a full gateway with per-user spend tracking, virtual keys, and A2A/MCP protocol support — making it the enterprise LLM traffic controller
Best for: ML platform teams managing multi-provider LLM access with centralized cost tracking and auth; Developers switching between LLM providers without changing application code
4. Bifrost AI Gateway
Fastest enterprise AI gateway (50x faster than LiteLLM) with adaptive load balancer, cluster mode, guardrails, 1000+ models support & <100 µs overhead at 5k RPS.
What sets it apart: Fastest AI gateway with 11us overhead at 5k RPS — built in Go for extreme performance vs LiteLLM/Portkey's Python-based proxies
Best for: High-throughput production AI gateways needing sub-millisecond overhead; Multi-provider failover with zero-downtime requirements
5. OmniRoute
OmniRoute is an AI gateway for multi-provider LLMs: an OpenAI-compatible endpoint with smart routing, load balancing, retries, and fallbacks. Add policies, rate limits, caching, and observability for
What sets it apart: OmniRoute is Uniswap's specialized cross-chain routing engine for DeFi, not comparable to AI tools — it optimizes token swap execution across liquidity pools
Best for: DeFi developers integrating Uniswap smart routing into trading applications
6. TensorZero
TensorZero is an open-source LLMOps platform that unifies an LLM gateway, observability, evaluation, optimization, and experimentation.
What sets it apart: Only LLM gateway that combines inference, observability, evaluation, and optimization in one Rust-based system with data flywheel — vs LiteLLM (routing only) or Langfuse (observability only)
Best for: Teams wanting a unified LLM gateway with built-in optimization feedback loop; Production systems needing <1ms latency overhead at scale; Organizations wanting to continuously improve LLM performance from production data
7. helicone
🧊 Open source LLM observability platform. One line of code to monitor, evaluate, and experiment. YC W23 🍓
What sets it apart: vs LangSmith/Braintrust: Combined AI Gateway + Observability platform with one-line integration, generous free tier, unified access to 100+ models, and built-in prompt versioning - Y Combinator backed
Best for: Teams needing unified observability across multiple LLM providers; Production AI apps requiring cost tracking and prompt management; Developers wanting a single API gateway for 100+ models
8. Casdoor
An open-source Agent-first Identity and Access Management (IAM) /LLM MCP & agent gateway and auth server with web UI supporting OpenClaw, MCP, OAuth, OIDC, SAML
What sets it apart: Combines traditional enterprise IAM protocols with MCP specifically for AI agent authentication and access management.
Best for: Teams needing agent-first IAM solutions; Projects requiring MCP authentication for agents; Organizations wanting self-hosted auth with multiple protocol support
FAQ
- What are the best alternatives to Kong?
- The closest open-source alternatives to Kong are Tyk API Gateway, AI Gateway and LiteLLM, followed by Bifrost AI Gateway, OmniRoute and TensorZero. They are ranked by how closely they match what Kong does.
- Which Kong alternative is the most popular?
- OmniRoute has the most GitHub stars among Kong alternatives, with 71,743 stars.
- Which Kong alternative is the most actively maintained?
- By recent activity, LiteLLM (13,153 commits in the last 90 days) is the most actively developed alternative.