blog: Barbacane vs Portkey and LiteLLM comparison#12
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Second piece of the audit's Phase 1 comparison-content strategy. Targets the "Barbacane vs Portkey" / "Barbacane vs LiteLLM" / "inbound vs outbound AI gateway" search terms. Thesis: Portkey and LiteLLM (outbound AI gateways, application -> LLM) and Barbacane (inbound AI gateway, agent -> your APIs) solve different problems and most teams end up running both. The category distinction is the high-value takeaway; specific feature compare is the usual procurement grind. Structure: - Lede: the vocabulary-collision problem - Two directions of traffic - What Portkey and LiteLLM do, concretely - What Barbacane does, concretely - How the two categories compose in a production stack - Where the overlap actually is (AI governance middleware) - Decision table by situation - Feature comparison table - Procurement advice - Closing, links back to the canonical MCP gateway post and /mcp/ Saved as draft: true with publishDate 2026-04-29 (six days out). Flip the draft flag in a follow-up commit when ready to publish.
…e AI capability Previous draft was factually wrong: it claimed Barbacane is inbound-only and does not talk to LLMs. In fact: - `ai-proxy` dispatcher (shipped, docs.barbacane.dev/guide/dispatchers.html#ai-proxy) is an outbound AI proxy that routes to OpenAI, Anthropic, Ollama, and any OpenAI-compat endpoint; supports provider fallback, named targets for policy-driven routing, pinned provider API versions, SSE streaming for OpenAI-compatible providers. - ADR-0024 names Kong AI Gateway, LiteLLM, Portkey, KrakenD as direct competitors and positions Barbacane's spec-driven + WASM-composable approach as the differentiator. - PR #67 (feat: AI gateway middleware suite) ships the four AI governance middlewares that compose around ai-proxy. - PR #69 (ADR-0030) extends ai-proxy with OpenAI Responses API support and dynamic model routing. Rewrite: - Title changed from "inbound vs outbound AI gateways" to "picking an AI gateway in 2026". Inbound/outbound is still useful taxonomy, but the dichotomy is wrong for Barbacane. - New thesis: all three ship outbound LLM proxy competently; the axis that differentiates them is how AI gateway relates to the rest of the gateway (monolithic AI proxy vs dispatcher + middlewares, config file vs OpenAPI spec, AI-only vs also-MCP). - Decision table and feature table rebuilt honestly; Barbacane shows Yes on outbound-related concerns now. - Kept MCP as an additional capability that Portkey/LiteLLM do not have, not as the entire reason to pick Barbacane. Claims verified against: - docs.barbacane.dev/guide/dispatchers.html (ai-proxy) - barbacane-dev/barbacane adr/0024-ai-gateway-plugin.md - barbacane-dev/barbacane#67 (AI gateway middleware suite) - barbacane-dev/barbacane#69 (ADR-0030 Responses API)
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Summary
Test plan