Cloudflare AI Gateway vs Kong AI Gateway
Both are llm gateways tools. Here is how they actually differ on price, billing model and deployment.
Cloudflare AI Gateway
Core gateway features free on every Cloudflare plan, running at the edge rather than in one region. Its 2026 unified billing lets you pay OpenAI, Anthropic and Google through a single Cloudflare invoice.
Kong AI Gateway
AI routing built into Kong's established API gateway. The right answer if Kong already fronts your APIs and governance is the priority - an expensive one if you are adopting Kong just for this.
| Cloudflare AI Gateway | Kong AI Gateway | |
|---|---|---|
| Category | LLM Gateways | LLM Gateways |
| Our rating | 4/5 | 3/5 |
| Starting price | $0 | Around $500/mo (Konnect) |
| Billing meter | record | No usage metering |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free self-hosting | No or paid tier only | Yes, free |
| Best for | Teams already on Cloudflare who want caching, rate limiting and cost visibility at the edge with no markup, and who have separate tooling for evaluation. | Organisations already standardised on Kong for API management, where bringing LLM traffic under existing governance matters more than LLM-specific features. |
Our verdict on Cloudflare AI Gateway
Cloudflare AI Gateway is the best free managed gateway available, and the reason is that Cloudflare is not trying to make money from it directly. Core features - dashboard analytics, caching, rate limiting - are free on every plan, there is no percentage markup on your tokens, and the free tier includes 100,000 logs a month with the $5 Workers Paid plan lifting that to a million. Compare OpenRouter charging 5.5% of everything you spend forever, and the difference at volume is substantial. Running at the edge is a genuine architectural advantage too, putting the control plane near your users rather than in one region. The 2026 addition of unified billing, letting you pay for OpenAI, Anthropic and Google AI Studio usage through a single Cloudflare invoice, removes procurement friction that is more annoying in practice than it sounds. Two honest limits. The metering is logs, not requests, so that is the number to model. And observability stops at request metrics and cost - there is no structured evaluation, so this is one component of a stack rather than the stack.
Full Cloudflare AI Gateway review →Our verdict on Kong AI Gateway
Kong AI Gateway is a straightforward proposition that depends almost entirely on one question - do you already run Kong? If you do, this is close to an obvious choice. LLM traffic comes under the same policy, authentication, rate limiting and governance as the rest of your APIs, managed by the same platform team through the same control plane, rather than existing as a parallel system nobody owns. For an organisation where API governance is already a formal function, that consolidation is worth more than any LLM-specific feature. If you do not already run Kong, the calculation inverts sharply. Konnect is reported at roughly $500 to $2,500 a month against Cloudflare AI Gateway's $5 or self-hosted LiteLLM's infrastructure cost, and the LLM-specific capabilities are thinner than dedicated AI gateways. You would be adopting a substantial API management platform to solve a problem that cheaper, more focused tools solve directly.
Full Kong AI Gateway review →Frequently Asked Questions
What is the main difference between Cloudflare AI Gateway and Kong AI Gateway?
Cloudflare AI Gateway: Teams already on Cloudflare who want caching, rate limiting and cost visibility at the edge with no markup, and who have separate tooling for evaluation. Kong AI Gateway: Organisations already standardised on Kong for API management, where bringing LLM traffic under existing governance matters more than LLM-specific features. Both sit in LLM Gateways, so the decision usually comes down to billing model and deployment rather than raw capability.
Which is cheaper, Cloudflare AI Gateway or Kong AI Gateway?
It depends entirely on your workload shape, because they meter differently - Cloudflare AI Gateway bills on record and Kong AI Gateway bills on no usage metering. Published starting prices are $0 and Around $500/mo (Konnect) respectively, but those numbers are not comparable until you apply them to the same traffic. Use our cost calculator to model both against your own request volume and span count.
Can I self-host Cloudflare AI Gateway or Kong AI Gateway?
Cloudflare AI Gateway: No or paid tier only. Kong AI Gateway: Yes, free. Free self-hosting means no licence fee, not no cost - you still own the infrastructure, upgrades and on-call.