LiteLLM Alternatives: Best Open-Source and Secure LLM Gateways in 2025

LiteLLM Alternatives: Best Open-Source and Secure LLM Gateways in 2025

As AI tools continue to evolve, more teams are deploying multiple LLMs across providers like OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral, and Cohere. LiteLLM has become a popular gateway for abstracting away these differences, offering a unified OpenAI-compatible API to interact with over 100 models. But LiteLLM may not be the perfect fit for your team.

In this guide, we’ll break down why some teams are seeking alternatives and explore the top open-source and enterprise-ready options for managing and securing access to LLMs in 2025.

Why Look for a LiteLLM Alternative?

LiteLLM is powerful, flexible, and well-supported by the open-source community. However, developers and organizations may seek alternatives for several reasons:

• Security and compliance gaps: The open-source version lacks built-in authentication, audit logging, and policy controls.

• Inconsistent documentation and support: Key features are difficult to implement without community support, which is often under-resourced.

• Rapid release cycles: Frequent changes can introduce regressions and make it difficult to maintain production environments.

• Enterprise features gated behind paywalls: SSO, admin UIs, and detailed access logs are available only to enterprise customers.

• Overhead for small or focused use cases: Teams using only one or two providers may find LiteLLM too complex.

If you’re hitting these limitations, here are some of the most popular and effective LiteLLM alternatives available today.

Top LiteLLM Alternatives

1. OpenRouter

A fully managed service that routes requests to multiple models without infrastructure overhead.

Strengths:

• Fast access to new models

• Unified billing and usage tracking

Limitations:

• Limited control over routing logic

• Basic authentication only

2. Portkey

A developer-focused LLM gateway with rich observability, key management, and caching features.

Strengths:

• Provider dashboards and admin UI

• Logging, caching, and analytics

Limitations:

• Smaller community and newer project

• Some enterprise features behind paywall

3. Pomerium

An identity-aware proxy designed to secure access to LLM infrastructure. Pomerium integrates with existing LLM gateways to enforce access policies, manage identities, and deliver compliance-grade audit logging.

Strengths:

• OIDC/Connect authentication

• Fine-grained access control and policy engine

• Works alongside LiteLLM, OpenRouter, and others

Limitations:

• Focuses on access control and governance, not model routing or API unification

4. Helicone

An OpenAI-compatible proxy with built-in observability, caching, and cost tracking.

Strengths:

• Easy to deploy and use

• Rich logging and analytics tools

Limitations:

• Narrow support for models outside OpenAI-compatible APIs

• Limited access control features

5. LangServe

A wrapper that exposes LangChain agents and workflows as RESTful APIs. Not a full LLM gateway, but commonly used as one.

Strengths:

• LangChain-native deployment

• Highly flexible architecture

Limitations:

• No access control or routing features by default

• Requires manual setup for observability and security

6. TrueFoundry LLM Gateway

An enterprise-ready framework that supports model abstraction and fine-grained control across LLM providers.

Strengths:

• Policy management, quota control, key rotation

• Strong focus on MLOps and production stability

Limitations:

• Less focus on OSS community adoption

• UI and feature set skew enterprise

7. Custom Proxies (FastAPI, Envoy, etc.)

Building your own proxy allows total control, with greater flexibility and customization.

Strengths:

• Fully tailored to internal infrastructure

• Integrates with existing tools and policies

Limitations:

• High development and maintenance effort

• Reinvents features most gateways offer out of the box

Feature Comparison Table

Securing LLM Gateways with Pomerium

Regardless of which gateway you use, securing access to LLMs is essential. Pomerium is an identity-aware access proxy that sits in front of any HTTP-based service—including LiteLLM, OpenRouter, or your own custom proxy.

With Pomerium, teams can:

• Authenticate users via OIDC, SAML, or your identity provider

• Define dynamic access policies based on roles, time, device, and location

• Rotate credentials automatically and prevent token leakage

• Log every request with full identity and context metadata

• Enforce compliance and support audit requirements (SOC 2, HIPAA, FedRAMP)

When paired with a flexible gateway, Pomerium helps teams operate LLM infrastructure securely and at scale.

Conclusion

If LiteLLM isn’t the right fit for your use case, there are plenty of capable alternatives—each offering different strengths around flexibility, security, and developer experience. Whether you're deploying at enterprise scale or experimenting with new models, there's an LLM gateway—and security layer—that can meet your needs.

Learn more about securing LLM infrastructure:

• Why Traditional Access Controls Fail in LLM Deployments

• Your Employees Are Already Dumping Company Data to LLMs (Here’s What To Do About It)