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AI gateway comparison: how to actually choose one
“AI gateway” means four different things depending on who's selling it. Here's the honest landscape — the categories, what to evaluate, and where Alpha fits.
The landscape
Four things people call an “AI gateway.”
Most tools do one of these well. The question isn't which is best — it's which job you're actually trying to do.
One API across providers
A single OpenAI-style endpoint that forwards your calls to whichever provider you point it at. Developer-first, usually self-hosted, focused on the call itself.
e.g. LiteLLMSee what your calls did
Logging, tracing, metrics and evals for LLM calls after they happen. Great for debugging and analytics; the call still runs wherever it ran.
e.g. Helicone, LangfuseOne key, many models
A hosted account that fans out to hundreds of models behind one API key and one bill. Fast to start; the account and the spend sit with the marketplace.
e.g. OpenRouterRun, govern and compound agents
Routing plus budgets per agent, guardrails, memory that compounds, and sovereign deployment — the control plane your agents run inside, not just the pipe they call through.
AlphaDescriptions reflect how each project positions itself; capabilities change fast — check each vendor's current docs. Alpha is the operating-layer row.
What to evaluate
Seven questions to ask any gateway.
Run every option — including Alpha — through the same checklist. The answers separate a pipe from an operating layer.
Routing & multi-provider
Can you move traffic across providers and models without rewriting agents?
Alpha: Multi-provider routing across OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Bedrock and more, addressed as provider:model.
BYOK & markup
Whose provider account pays — and is there a margin on your tokens?
Alpha: Bring your own key. Alpha routes through your own provider accounts and never marks up model spend.
Budget per agent
Can you cap and attribute cost per agent, not just per workspace?
Alpha: A real monthly limit per agent, so spend is attributed and capped where the work happens.
Reliability
What happens to your agents when the gateway is down?
Alpha: Designed to fail open — calls fall back to your providers directly, so control isn't a single point of failure.
Memory & compounding
Does the data your agents generate make them cheaper and better over time — and does it stay yours?
Alpha: Memory distilled from traces is reused as context, and good traces feed a fine-tune flywheel. What your agents learn stays yours.
Deployment & sovereignty
Can it run fully inside your boundary?
Alpha: Cloud, hybrid, or self-hosted / sovereign — nothing has to leave your environment.
Governance & compliance
Can you produce evidence, roles and guardrails when someone signs off?
Alpha: Role-based workspaces, audit logs, request-time guardrails, and NIST AI RMF-aligned tracking.
Head to head
Alpha vs. a typical AI gateway.
If you've narrowed it to “a gateway,” here's the sharper contrast — routing a call versus owning the agent that makes it.
Stop comparing. See your number.
The fastest way to evaluate a gateway is to see what your agents cost today. Arena shows you — free, no keys, no integration.