Bifrost (Maxim AI)

Platforms & APIs 💻 Go ⚖️ Apache-2.0 🟢 Actively maintained
7.8k stars

Bifrost is a high-performance AI gateway that unifies access to 23+ AI providers through a single OpenAI-compatible API. It solves the problem of integrating with multiple AI providers by providing automatic failover, load balancing, semantic caching, and enterprise features. It is for developers building AI applications that need reliability and scalability.

Bifrost (Maxim AI) demo
🖼️ Screenshot from the project README

✨ Key features

  • Unified OpenAI-compatible API for 23+ providers
  • Automatic failover and load balancing across providers
  • Semantic caching to reduce costs and latency
  • Supports multimodal and streaming requests
  • Web UI for configuration and monitoring
  • Drop-in replacement for OpenAI, Anthropic, and GenAI SDKs

🎯 Use cases

  • Build AI applications that never go down with automatic failover
  • Manage multiple AI providers through a single API endpoint
  • Reduce API costs with semantic caching
  • Enable AI models to use external tools via MCP
  • Implement governance and budget controls for AI usage

📦 Installation

🧰 Requirements: Requires Node.js (for npx) or Docker; no API keys needed for the gateway itself, but provider keys are configured via the web UI.

Install and run locally
npx -y @maximhq/bifrost
Or use Docker
docker run -p 8080:8080 maximhq/bifrost

🚀 Usage

Start the gateway (if not already running)
npx -y @maximhq/bifrost
Make a chat completion request
curl -X POST http://localhost:8080/v1/chat/completions \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "model": "openai/gpt-4o-mini",
    "messages": [{"role": "user", "content": "Hello, Bifrost!"}]
  }'

⚠️ Good to know

Enterprise features like adaptive load balancing, clustering, guardrails, and MCP gateway are only available in enterprise deployments.

❓ FAQ

How do I install Bifrost?

You can install and run Bifrost locally using npx: npx -y @maximhq/bifrost, or use Docker: docker run -p 8080:8080 maximhq/bifrost.

What providers are supported?

Bifrost supports 23+ providers including OpenAI, Anthropic, AWS Bedrock, Google Vertex, Azure, Cerebras, Cohere, Mistral, Ollama, and Groq.

Can I use Bifrost as a drop-in replacement for OpenAI SDK?

Yes, you can change the base_url in the OpenAI SDK to http://localhost:8080/openai and it will work with Bifrost.

Does Bifrost add significant latency?

No, Bifrost adds minimal overhead. In benchmarks, it added only 11 µs per request on a t3.xlarge instance.

📊 Repository

Stars★ 7,820
Forks🍴 1,160
Open issues🐛 973
Last commit🕒 Sep 4, 2026
Created📅 Mar 2025
Language💻 Go
License⚖️ Apache-2.0

🤖 Overview, features, install steps and FAQ were generated from the project's README on Sep 4, 2026. Always check the original source before running commands.