Comparison
AI gateway vs AI control plane.
Vidai, LiteLLM Proxy, Portkey and Kong AI Gateway, side by side on governance, drop-in compatibility and performance.
1 · How the products compare
Cost control, policy and audit on every call.
Performance only matters if the boundary is doing the work your organisation actually needs: attributing every pound to a team in real time, stopping the runaway agent before the invoice, enforcing policy in the request path, and producing the audit trail your regulator asks for.
Where applicable: inside-the-perimeter, built-in and acts, not alerts answers are stronger
Two beats decide this comparison. The cost beat: attribution in real time, hard budget breakers that act not alert, a rate-card server that survives a vendor price change. The sovereignty beat: where requests travel, where the audit trail lives, and whether regulatory mapping comes with the product. Vidai is the only entry where all of these answers stay inside your perimeter.
2 · Performance
Governed traffic at proxy-pace speed.
The benchmark below was run with the other gateways in minimal pass-through mode (no auth, no rate limits, no policy applied). Vidai was tested with production features active, with auth, API key validation, rate limiting and routing. Even doing the governance work, Vidai sustains higher throughput at lower latency.
Throughput, requests per second
Higher is better
p95 latency, milliseconds
Lower is better
Even doing more work, Vidai is roughly 15× the throughput of LiteLLM and 4× the throughput of Portkey at sustained production load. The full benchmark, the methodology and the source code are at /blog/rust-python-vidai.
3 · What changes in your application
Base URL change, not an SDK rewrite.
Most products in this category serve a "100+ providers" list via the OpenAI-compatible shape. Vidai supports the same long tail. The drop-in difference is the native SDK: Vidai is drop-in with the native Anthropic SDK, the native Google GenAI SDK, and the OpenAI SDK as-is.
"Yes" answers are stronger — fewer code changes
The full SDK × upstream matrix is in the documentation.
4 · Which one is right for you
Pick the boundary that matches your constraint.
If your principal constraint is cost attribution and enforced spend at agent-pace, the dedicated read is /use-cases/control-ai-spend.
5 · Frequently asked
Common questions on this comparison.
What is the difference between an AI gateway and an AI control plane?
An AI gateway is an application-layer proxy: it routes a model call and emits a log line. An AI control plane is infrastructure: every request also passes through policy enforcement, real-time cost attribution and an audit trail recorded inside your own perimeter. The control plane is what regulated organisations reach for once gateway-shaped tools stop answering the audit, finance and sovereignty questions on their own.
Do I need an AI gateway or an AI control plane?
If a single team uses one provider, throughput is low, and nobody is asking the compliance question, an AI gateway is the right choice. You need a control plane when more than one team is using the same infrastructure with different budgets, a regulator or auditor is asking what the AI traffic did, or agent-pace traffic has broken the cost dashboard you set up for chat.
Are there self-hosted alternatives to LiteLLM Proxy?
Yes. LiteLLM Proxy itself is self-hosted (Python). Vidai is self-hosted (a single binary inside your VPC) and adds in-path policy enforcement, per-team cost attribution and an audit trail mapped to regulatory frameworks. Kong AI Gateway is self-hosted via Kong's plugin model. Portkey is SaaS by default; the self-hosted option still crosses Portkey's perimeter when telemetry is collected.
What is the best AI gateway for enterprise?
The honest answer is that the best AI gateway for enterprise is usually not a gateway; it is a control plane. Enterprises that start with a gateway typically rebuild it as something stricter once the audit, residency and multi-team cost questions arrive. The comparison on this page lays out the trade-offs.
Can I use Vidai with my existing Anthropic SDK or Google GenAI SDK?
Yes. Vidai is drop-in with the native Anthropic SDK, the native Google GenAI SDK and the OpenAI SDK as-is. Base URL and API key change, nothing else. The full SDK × upstream support matrix is in the documentation at docs.vidai.uk/server/client-integrations.
Run the boundary your auditor and CFO can actually use.
A 20-minute walkthrough on a real deployment. Cost, policy and audit, governed from inside your perimeter.