LiteLLM Alternative — Cortega, a Faster Enterprise AI Gateway
LiteLLM alternative

The fastest AI gateway, and it governs every request.

On LiteLLM’s own AIGatewayBench, Cortega added 0.33 ms p99 per request — with policy, data protection, and MCP tool checks running on every call. LiteLLM’s published figure for its Rust gateway is 0.66 ms.

One benchmark. Three numbers. Same hardware. SUSTAINED THROUGHPUT — REQUESTS/SEC (HIGHER IS BETTER) Cortega data plane ~36,000 req/s LiteLLM (rust mode) 983 req/s p99 LATENCY ADDED — MS (LOWER IS BETTER) Cortega data plane ~2 ms LiteLLM (rust mode) 71 ms MEMORY UNDER LOAD Cortega data plane ~25 MB LiteLLM (rust mode) 2.15 GB · ~85× more agentgateway 1.4.0 vs LiteLLM 1.98.0 (rust mode). Fortio, mock backend, 32 connections. Source: agentgateway.dev, August 2026.
Benchmark

The benchmark

0.33 msp99 latency Cortega adds per request, on AIGatewayBench
Governance onpolicy, data protection, and MCP checks ran on every request during the test
1:1streaming stays token by token — Cortega adds no buffering
Independent testing

Independent numbers differ

agentgateway (Cortega’s data plane) benchmarked against LiteLLM on identical hardware: Fortio, mock backend, 32 connections, June and August 2026.

GatewayRequests / secp99 latency addedMemory
Cortega data plane (agentgateway)~36,000~2 ms~25 MB
LiteLLM, Rust mode98371 ms2.15 GB
LiteLLM, Python mode3,19832 ms11.8 GB
Throughput

One gateway, 50,000+ req/s

A separate machine sends traffic over a real network. The upstream model is held at a fixed delay; the request rate rises until the gateway runs out of room.

Requests per secondSuccessMedian latencyAdded by the gateway
40,000100%62 ms~2 ms
48,000100%63 ms~3 ms
52,000100%65 ms~5 ms
53,00099.97%69 msout of headroom

Cortega runs as a fleet, so capacity grows as you add gateways. Full method on the performance page.

Recently added

What's new in Cortega

None of this is on LiteLLM's roadmap. It ships as part of the same platform, not a bolt-on.

01

AI Bench

Industry and agentic-security benchmark suites — jailbreaks, prompt injection, multi-turn escalation, MCP tool poisoning — scored against your live guardrails.

See AI Bench →
02

Guardrails

Social engineering, financial fraud and risk scoring, and policy-document compliance, alongside PII/PCI and jailbreak detection.

See Guardrails →
03

Model recommendations & Studies

Ranked upgrade candidates from your own measured traffic, and a way to benchmark one before it ever serves a live request.

See Model Manager →
04

Data & analytics plane, sized for growth

Tenant telemetry is isolated on read today; the architecture is designed to run a large tenant's analytics on its own store as volume grows.

See MSP governance →
05

Agentic management

Cortega Agents scores live agent sessions for risk, compliance, quality, and cost — and Endpoint Guard governs the coding assistants your developers run.

See Coding Assistant Governance →
Feature check

LiteLLM vs Cortega

LiteLLM is a strong developer gateway. Some of what an enterprise needs sits behind its paid Enterprise tier; some it does not do at all.

CapabilityLiteLLMCortega
Model access and routingOpen source. One API across providers, keys, budgets, routing, fallbacks.Included, with policy applied on every route.
SSO and RBACPaid. Free up to 5 users, then an Enterprise license.Included. Tied to policy, audit, model access, and tool actions.
Audit logsPaid. Listed as an Enterprise feature.Included. Links identity, policy result, data, model, and outcome.
GuardrailsOpen source. Set per request, key, or team.A full AI firewall: block, redact, route, approve, or record before the call proceeds — plus social engineering, fraud/risk, and policy-document guardrails.
MCP tool governancePartial. MCP support, credential work on the roadmap.Full: servers, tools, permissions, calls, evidence, and policy in one model.
Model recommendations & migration testingNot offered.Ranks upgrade candidates from your measured traffic, then benchmarks a candidate before it serves production.
Security & industry benchmarksNot offered.AI Bench: jailbreak, prompt-injection, MCP tool-poisoning, and industry suites, scored against your live guardrails.
Coding-assistant governanceNot offered.Endpoint Guard configures Claude Code, Codex CLI, OpenCode, and Pi on enrolled machines with one governed key, one switch to disable.
Employee / shadow AINot offered. Governs application and developer API traffic.Endpoint Guard covers ChatGPT, Claude, browsers, and internal assistants.
Where AI traffic data sitsIn its database. Requests and spend logged to Postgres.Kept out of the operational database. Governance does not store prompts or responses.
Usage intelligenceLimited. Spend and usage tracking.What teams use AI for, where quality drifts, where strategy and real use differ.
Multi-tenant analytics at scaleBasic multi-tenant support via virtual keys.Tenant-isolated policy and gateways today; architected to shard analytics per tenant as volume grows.
Operating cost

The full stack

Self-managed

What LiteLLM needs

  • Run and tune multiple proxy replicas, load balance, handle deploys
  • Postgres for keys, users, and logs — HA, backups, upgrades, growth
  • Redis for cache, rate limits, and budgets across workers
  • Decide how to export, retain, and explain usage
  • Your team owns uptime, upgrades, alerts, scaling, security reviews
With Cortega

What Cortega does instead

  • Distributed gateways managed from one control plane
  • Light Postgres use — traffic data is not stored there, so reporting does not grow the database
  • Policy and gateway state are part of the platform, not parts you wire up
  • A separate reporting layer that can also read AI traffic already on your network
  • One product surface for routing, policy, firewall, evidence, analytics, and gateway management
References

Sources

Cortega’s 0.33 ms figure is our run of AIGatewayBench, LiteLLM’s own gateway-overhead benchmark, one request stream at a time with the load generator on the gateway node. LiteLLM’s published AIGatewayBench figures put its Rust gateway at 0.66 ms, Portkey at 2.29 ms, and Bifrost at 4.54 ms of added latency per request (p99).

The throughput, latency, and memory comparison is from the agentgateway project’s published benchmarks (agentgateway.dev, 26 June 2026 and 13 August 2026): Fortio, mock backend, 32 connections, agentgateway 1.4.0 versus LiteLLM 1.98.0 in Rust mode.

Cortega’s 52,000 req/s figure is a separate test over a real network against a fixed-delay upstream, on a single 8 vCPU instance, using the Bifrost benchmark harness.

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