RelayPlane vs LiteLLM vs Helicone vs Bifrost: The LLM Gateway Comparison for 2026

LLM infrastructure has quietly become one of the messier parts of a production AI stack. You started with a single API key and a fetch call. Now you've got four providers, no idea which request cost what, and a bill that surprises you every month. The answer is a gateway layer, but which one?

Four tools come up constantly in this space: LiteLLM, Helicone, Bifrost, and RelayPlane. They are not interchangeable. They solve different problems, make different tradeoffs, and fit different stacks. Here is an honest breakdown.

Quick Comparison

When to Use Each

LiteLLM is the right call if your team runs Python and needs access to the full universe of models. With 100+ provider integrations, it is the most comprehensive option out there. The tradeoff: getting the interesting features (spend tracking, team management, virtual keys) means standing up a Postgres database and running Docker. For a Python ML team that already lives in that world, it is a natural fit. For a Node.js shop, adding Python infrastructure for a proxy layer is a real operational burden.

Helicone is for teams that want observability on their LLM calls without changing how those calls are made. You wrap your existing API key, point your base URL at Helicone, and you get a dashboard showing latency, cost, error rates, and user sessions. It is genuinely useful for debugging and cost analysis. The limitation is that it is not a router. Helicone does not route traffic between providers, enforce budgets, or do anything when a provider goes down. If you need those things, Helicone alone will not get you there.

Bifrost makes a specific bet: raw throughput above everything else. Built in Go, it claims sub-100 microsecond overhead at high request volumes. If you are at a scale where gateway latency shows up in your tail percentiles and you need cluster mode and horizontal scaling, Bifrost is worth evaluating. For most teams running a few thousand requests per day, you will not feel the difference, and Bifrost is closed-source on the hosted side with a smaller community than LiteLLM.

RelayPlane is the answer if you are working in Node.js and you want cost intelligence built in from day one. No Docker, no database, no external service to sign up for. Three lines of code and you have a running proxy with per-request cost tracking, complexity-based routing across 11 providers, and budget enforcement that actually does something (block, warn, or downgrade the request) when you hit your limit.

What Makes RelayPlane Different

The pitch is simple: you should not need infrastructure to get started with an LLM gateway.

Three lines. No seriously.

npm install -g @relayplane/proxy
relayplane init
relayplane start

That is a working proxy with cost tracking and routing. No Docker Compose. No database migrations. You install a package, run two commands, and you're live.

npm install @relayplane/proxy

That is the entire install step.

Cost tracking per request, not per month. Most teams discover their LLM spend problem at billing time. By then it is too late to know which workflow caused the spike or which agent went off the rails. RelayPlane tracks input tokens, output tokens, and computed cost for every request. It handles Anthropic prompt cache read savings and write costs separately, so the numbers you see are accurate. You can set daily or per-request budget limits, and when something hits the limit, the proxy does not just log a warning, it can block the request or downgrade it to a cheaper model automatically.

Routing that maps task complexity to model cost. The routing config is explicit, not magic. You define what counts as a "simple" task and what counts as "complex," then map those levels to models. A simple text classification call goes to a fast, cheap model. A detailed code review goes to a capable one. You decide the rules; the proxy enforces them consistently across every request without you having to put that logic in your application code.

npm-installable, open source. The package is @relayplane/proxy on npm. The source is at github.com/RelayPlane/proxy. No vendor lock-in, no account required to run it locally.

Switching from LiteLLM (or Others) to RelayPlane

If you are on LiteLLM and want to try RelayPlane, the migration is straightforward because both expose an OpenAI-compatible API. Your application code stays the same. You change one base URL.

Before (LiteLLM):

const OpenAI = require('openai');

const client = new OpenAI({
  apiKey: process.env.LITELLM_API_KEY,
  baseURL: 'http://localhost:4000',  // LiteLLM proxy
});

const response = await client.chat.completions.create({
  model: 'gpt-4o',
  messages: [{ role: 'user', content: 'Hello' }],
});

After (RelayPlane):

# Setup (once)
npm install -g @relayplane/proxy
relayplane init    # walks you through provider keys
relayplane start   # proxy runs on localhost:4100

// Application code (same as before, just point to the proxy)
const OpenAI = require('openai');

const client = new OpenAI({
  apiKey: process.env.RELAYPLANE_API_KEY,
  baseURL: 'http://localhost:4100',  // RelayPlane proxy
});

const response = await client.chat.completions.create({
  model: 'gpt-4o',  // same model names work
  messages: [{ role: 'user', content: 'Hello' }],
});

The only change in your application code is the port number. The proxy handles the translation to whichever provider you have configured, and every request comes back with cost metadata attached.

Coming from Helicone is even simpler: Helicone requires no proxy, just header injection. RelayPlane also works as a drop-in baseURL replacement. You remove the Helicone headers, update the base URL to http://localhost:4100, and you go from observability to routing plus observability.

Bottom Line

If you are in a Python shop and need the broadest model coverage possible, LiteLLM is the established choice. Accept the infrastructure overhead; it comes with the territory.

If you want cost visibility without routing, Helicone is a clean hosted option. Just know what it is: a dashboard, not a gateway. It will not save you from a provider outage or route traffic intelligently.

If you are processing serious request volume and latency at the gateway layer is a measurable problem, Bifrost is worth benchmarking.

If you are building in Node.js and you want a proxy that installs in thirty seconds, costs nothing to run locally, and gives you per-request cost tracking and intelligent routing out of the box, RelayPlane is the practical choice for 2026. Three lines of code. No Docker. Real cost data. That is the pitch, and for most Node.js teams, it holds up.

npm install @relayplane/proxy

Start there.

RelayPlane is open source. Source: github.com/RelayPlane/proxy. Package: @relayplane/proxy v1.8.10 on npm. Supports 11 providers. Last verified: 2026-03-11.