Is Conifer an alternative to Kong AI Gateway?

Yes, if you would rather use a hosted gateway than run one. Both put one API in front of models from many providers, with fallbacks, spending limits and cost tracking. Kong AI Gateway also governs MCP and agent-to-agent traffic, and runs with your own provider credentials on gateway nodes you operate or that Kong hosts. Conifer is hosted and sells model usage from a prepaid balance.

Can I use Kong AI Gateway and Conifer together?

Yes. Kong AI Gateway can send a model’s traffic to any OpenAI-compatible address, so Conifer can serve the models while Kong’s policies and logs stay in front.

Do I need to run anything to use Conifer?

No. Conifer is a hosted service. Create a key, set the base URL in your client, and send requests.

Does Conifer store my prompts?

The gateway does not store the prompt of a standard request. It holds a response for ten minutes so that a retried request is not charged twice, and keeps request details such as the model, token counts and cost for billing.

Comparison

Conifer and Kong AI Gateway compared

Both put one API in front of AI models from many providers. Kong AI Gateway is part of Kong’s API platform and runs on gateway nodes you operate or that Kong hosts, and Conifer is a hosted service. This page sets out how each works, using each company’s own published documentation.

Summary

Kong AI Gateway governs LLM, MCP and agent-to-agent traffic with policies for access, guardrails, rate limits and cost. It is configured in Kong Konnect, and you connect it to each provider with your own credentials. Conifer is a hosted gateway. There is nothing to deploy, model usage is paid from a prepaid balance, and every response states the model that served it and the exact amount charged.

Kong AI Gateway details were read from konghq.com, developer.konghq.com and Kong’s GitHub repository on 7 November 2026. Plans and prices change; check Kong’s pages before you decide.

Side by side

Topic	Conifer	Kong AI Gateway
Where it runs	A hosted service at one Conifer address; there is nothing to deploy	Kong’s pricing page lists serverless, hybrid and Dedicated Cloud Gateways in Kong Konnect, and fully self-hosted gateways under its separate Gateway Enterprise offering. Its architecture page describes one mode: a Konnect control plane with data plane nodes in your own infrastructure
Who operates it	Conifer runs the service, chooses the provider for each request and retries another provider on failure	On the hybrid setup your team runs and sizes the data plane nodes, and Konnect runs the control plane. With Dedicated Cloud Gateways, Kong runs both, including scaling and upgrades
Open source	The Conifer SDK for TypeScript and Python is open source; the gateway is a hosted service	Kong Gateway is open source under the Apache 2.0 licence and includes AI features. The pricing page lists AI Proxy Advanced, AI Rate Limiting Advanced, AI Semantic Cache and AI Sanitizer among its enterprise plugins
Model access	More than 230 models paid from one prepaid balance, with no provider accounts needed; your own Azure OpenAI resource can sit behind the same key	You add each provider with your own credentials. The providers page lists OpenAI, Anthropic, Azure, Amazon Bedrock, Gemini, Mistral and others, and self-hosted models through Ollama and vLLM. Any OpenAI-compatible address can be set as the upstream
Interfaces	OpenAI Chat Completions, OpenAI Responses and Anthropic Messages on one key, plus embeddings	A standard OpenAI format translated to each provider, or a provider’s own format passed through. Models can serve chat, embedding, image, audio, video and realtime requests, and the same gateway carries MCP and agent-to-agent traffic
What you pay	Every model is billed at its maker’s published list price per token, from a prepaid balance with no subscription. Requests served by your own Azure OpenAI resource carry no Conifer fee	Plus starts at $25 a month plus usage: $25 a month per serverless control plane, $200 per hybrid one or $500 per Dedicated Cloud Gateway plus $0.15 per GB; 1 million requests a month included, then $200 a month for each further million; and $100 a month for each model proxied. Enterprise is custom and billed annually
Routing and fallbacks	Conifer picks the provider for each request. When a provider fails, rate-limits or times out, the gateway serves the same model from another provider at the same price, for models with more than one provider. A named model is served as named or refused, and you can list up to three fallback models	Each model spreads traffic across its targets by round-robin, the default, or by consistent hashing, least connections, lowest latency, lowest usage, prompt similarity or priority. On an error or timeout it retries, five times by default, and fails over to another target
Cost on each request	Every response carries the amount charged, itemised by token type, and a streamed response ends with the same receipt	Calculated for every request from the prices you set on each target or, from version 2.3, from Kong’s price catalog when none are set, including cache, context-size and service-tier pricing
Spending limits	A cost ceiling per request, a spend cap per key and a monthly limit on the account. A request that could exceed a ceiling is refused before any provider is called	The AI Rate Limiting Advanced policy limits tokens or cost for a consumer or group over a time window, including calendar months
Data handling	Requests pass through Conifer and the provider that serves them. The prompt of a standard request is not stored, a response is held for ten minutes so a retry is not charged twice, and request details such as model, tokens and cost are kept for billing	On the hybrid setup, traffic passes through data plane nodes in your infrastructure. Telemetry sent to Konnect holds usage, cost and latency, not request and response bodies, unless you turn payload logging on
Beyond the gateway	The docs cover the gateway, the router and the SDKs	Guardrail policies for AWS Guardrails, Azure Content Safety and NVIDIA NeMo, PII sanitizing, semantic caching, prompt compression, MCP servers built from your APIs, and a developer portal with monetization
Enterprise terms	Team accounts with owner, admin and member roles, per-key model scope and spend caps, set up on request	Dedicated Cloud Gateways list a 99.99% SLA, and serverless gateways list none. Enterprise is custom and billed annually, with volume discounts

Which one fits

Kong AI Gateway may suit you if: You already run Kong for your APIs, AI traffic must pass through gateway nodes in your own infrastructure, you want guardrails, PII sanitizing or semantic caching in the gateway, you want MCP and agent-to-agent traffic governed in the same place, or you already hold contracts with each provider.
Conifer may suit you if: You would rather not deploy or run gateway nodes; you want many models on one prepaid balance without an account with each provider; you need each response to state the model that served and the exact amount charged; or you want a cost ceiling on each request enforced before any provider is called.
Using both: Kong AI Gateway can send a model’s traffic to any OpenAI-compatible address. Set Conifer’s address as the upstream for an OpenAI-type model, with a Conifer key as its credential, and Kong’s policies and logs stay in front while Conifer serves the models.

Moving from Kong AI Gateway to Conifer

Address and key: Point your OpenAI or Anthropic client at Conifer and use a Conifer key.
OPENAI_BASE_URL=https://api.conifer.build/v1 OPENAI_API_KEY=$CONIFER_API_KEY
Model names: Use the model names in the Conifer catalog. Names with the lab in front, such as anthropic/claude-opus-5, are also accepted.
Fallbacks: Conifer tries another provider for the same model on its own. To try other models, list up to three fallbacks in a request header.
Keys and budgets: Give each person or service its own key with a spend cap. Team accounts are set up by Conifer, and an admin can limit a key to a list of models.
Check first: AWS Bedrock and Google Vertex are not served as your own endpoints today, the moderations endpoint is not served, and image, audio, Files and Batches endpoints have no Conifer equivalent.

Replace your provider key has the full steps, Any client covers other OpenAI-compatible software, and Teams covers team keys.

Conifer Gateway: One API key and endpoint for every model in the catalog, with the model and cost stated on every response.
What is an LLM gateway?: How a gateway sits between your software and the companies that serve models, and what to check when you choose one.
Conifer vs LiteLLM: The two gateways side by side, from each company's own documentation.
Conifer vs Portkey: The two gateways side by side, from each company's own documentation.
Conifer vs OpenRouter: The two gateways side by side, from each company's own documentation.
All comparisons: Conifer compared with eleven other LLM gateways and routers, from their own documentation.

Questions

Is Conifer an alternative to Kong AI Gateway?: Yes, if you would rather use a hosted gateway than run one. Both put one API in front of models from many providers, with fallbacks, spending limits and cost tracking. Kong AI Gateway also governs MCP and agent-to-agent traffic, and runs with your own provider credentials on gateway nodes you operate or that Kong hosts. Conifer is hosted and sells model usage from a prepaid balance.
Can I use Kong AI Gateway and Conifer together?: Yes. Kong AI Gateway can send a model’s traffic to any OpenAI-compatible address, so Conifer can serve the models while Kong’s policies and logs stay in front.
Do I need to run anything to use Conifer?: No. Conifer is a hosted service. Create a key, set the base URL in your client, and send requests.
Does Conifer store my prompts?: The gateway does not store the prompt of a standard request. It holds a response for ten minutes so that a retried request is not charged twice, and keeps request details such as the model, token counts and cost for billing.