Enterprise AI Gateway Comparison: SSO, RBAC and Audit Logs (2026)

An enterprise AI gateway sits between apps and model providers, enforcing policies on routed requests. As of October 2026, pick Requesty for managed governance across providers. Pick Bifrost Enterprise or LiteLLM Enterprise for self-hosting. Pick Portkey for Prisma AIRS, Kong for a Kong estate, or TrueFoundry for a wider ML platform. We make Requesty.

Enterprise AI gateways compared in 2026

The table compares enterprise configurations for identity and governance, as of October 2026. The difference is who runs the infrastructure and how each product scopes access.

If you need a self-hosted gateway, start with Bifrost or LiteLLM instead. Portkey has input and output guardrails, with a streaming distinction covered below. Kong's AI Gateway 2.x has dedicated AI entities and policies. TrueFoundry's resource grants scope access to model provider accounts.

Portkey's current documentation uses the Prisma AIRS AI Gateway name. Palo Alto Networks' July 2026 announcement describes the gateway as incorporating technology from the completed Portkey acquisition.

What does each plan cost?

These are published starting points as of October 2026. Model-provider charges are separate from the gateway terms.

What enterprise gateway governance must enforce

Every gateway has two paths to protect. Its management plane lets people configure access. Its request path checks credentials and configured policies before sending traffic to a model. SSO on the console does not automatically identify every application request: Requesty router calls authenticate with API keys, including keys issued to a service account.

Remove a person from the identity provider, then test the console session, their personal API keys and any service account used by their workload. A service account has a different owner and lifecycle from a person.

SCIM is a protocol for managing identities across systems. It is separate from SSO. Ask how group changes arrive, how conflicts resolve and how long removal takes. Portkey's SCIM mapping documentation states that deleting a group mapping leaves already provisioned users in the workspace. Make removal a separate test.

Ask for evidence, not a feature label

Now for the path no gateway can see: direct provider access. Restrict direct provider credentials and use network or endpoint controls appropriate to your environment. Browser apps and desktop agents deserve the same review as SDK traffic.

Admin audit and request logs are different records

An admin audit event answers who changed a policy, what changed and when. An inference log answers which credential called which model and provider, with usage or status fields according to the product. Ask for samples of both, including denied requests, export format, access permissions and retention.

Bifrost signs administrative audit events with HMAC. It generates a key if none is configured; operators can also configure and rotate keys. Ask how keys and exports will be managed: the current signature excludes certain fields, including tags, attachments and IP fields. This signing applies to administrative events, not every inference payload. Kong documents seven days of Konnect organization audit retention and supports export mechanisms; arrange longer-term storage if your policy requires it. Its AI policy telemetry is a separate record.

Requesty's compliance report downloads as PDF or verifiable JSON evidence. The JSON includes a payload identity hash, not a vendor signature; traffic evidence covers chat completions.

Check network restrictions, masking and key custody

Where the gateway runs decides who owns the network boundary and where data is processed.

Policy scope is easy to get wrong. Kong says its IP policy is skipped when attached to an AI Model; follow the documented global or consumer-scoped configuration. Configure trusted proxies and test the client IP Kong evaluates; otherwise the policy may evaluate the proxy address instead. TrueFoundry says its SaaS UI allowlist does not restrict AI gateway API traffic. Portkey says its guardrails evaluate the last message in a request, so test the message positions your application sends.

Storage and enforcement have their own boundaries:

• Requesty's zero data retention mode prevents new prompt and response payload storage at Requesty, but operational metadata is still stored. Existing payload logs remain, and provider retention is separate.
• Bifrost's logs-only redaction leaves provider-facing runtime content unchanged. Choose and test runtime redaction when the provider must receive masked content.
• Portkey's configured output guardrails check streamed output after the stream completes. The result is informational; it does not stop that output reaching the client or trigger fallback or retry.
• TrueFoundry skips output guardrails on streamed responses. System prompts are excluded from guardrail checks by default, with a documented CrowdStrike analysis exception.

For every vendor, ask how provider credentials are stored, rotated and exposed to users. Confirm a DPA, subprocessors, support access and retention for the contracted service. Requesty's DPA covers Requesty as a processor; provider terms need separate review. Portkey and Kong also publish DPA material.

An EU gateway is only one location check

A request can enter an EU gateway and still be sent to a model deployment elsewhere. Logs, backups, guardrail services and support access add more places to check. A private data plane does not determine the location of upstream inference either.

Requesty's EU routing guide places its EU gateway in Frankfurt and distinguishes gateway processing from provider hosting. Restrict the allowed gateway regions, select an EU-hosted model deployment and inspect every fallback target. Then ask legal to review the provider's retention and data-processing terms. Use our AI governance framework to assign owners and retain evidence for each data-flow control.

Configure Requesty for a governed rollout

Requesty gives you a managed gateway for multiple providers and a central place to assign model access. Enterprise adds SSO, groups and audit logs.

Connect people and choose the model sets

Ask support to enable Enterprise SSO and IdP sync. Same-named IdP groups map to Requesty groups and stay in sync. Deprovisioning removes the user and deletes their API keys.

Set Approved Models, then create named Access Lists for groups and production keys. Requesty has two organization roles, Admin and Member, plus group-scoped admin delegation. If your approval process requires arbitrary custom organization roles, include that requirement in the comparison.

A directly attached key list takes precedence over group lists; without a key list, attached group lists are combined as a union. When no key, group or group-default list applies, configured Approved Models apply; with no policy at any layer, the full catalog is allowed.

Here is a boundary test worth running on a key that belongs to two groups. Approve three available chat models, A, B and C, at the organization level. Set the group default to A, give Group 1 a B-only list and leave Group 2 without an explicit list. Ask support how to create and inspect a key associated with both groups and no direct list; record its actual group associations separately from its owner's memberships. Send all three requests with that key and no fallback policy. B is the positive control, C the deny control, and A distinguishes whether the default contributes in this mixed-group setup. Confirm provider connectivity and sufficient credit first. Add credits if the chosen models are paid.

In Enterprise key creation with groups enabled, the creator selects a group. When an access list is selected, it attaches directly to the key and takes precedence over group lists. The list selector can be hidden when the group has no list. A key with a directly attached list tests a different path from the two-group example.

Review every group and key list against your approved catalog and attempt a key-list override in the pilot. Test list creation and editing in both the console and management API; if a list containing a non-approved model is accepted, test requests through it and check upstream receipt. Include every needed modality: a list containing only chat models also blocks embedding, image and audio models. A denied model returns provider violates policy and is not forwarded upstream, according to the Access Lists documentation. Test actual requests as well as the model listing.

Set a shared budget and test sensitive data

Requesty group budgets have two modes. In the default Global mode, a group limit is a monthly allowance for each member. Group Budget mode is a shared monthly cap and must be enabled by support.

Assume a team has two members and a $200 group limit in Global mode. Neither member has a higher allowance from another group or a lower key or organization limit. Each member receives a $200 allowance, so the two allowances total $400. If the requirement is one shared $200 team cap, request Group Budget mode and test concurrent calls near that cap.

Issue separate personal and service-account keys, set applicable limits and expiry, and keep provider credentials in the gateway with BYOK where needed. Requesty also supports organization and per-key IP allowlists on every plan.

Requesty's guardrails have four scanners: PII Fast, PII ML, Secrets Fast and Secrets ML. Each supports Disabled, Report or Mask at organization or group scope. Report forwards the input unchanged; Mask replaces detected values before provider processing. Mask restores matching replacements in the response to the caller. The scanners do not scan a model response for newly generated sensitive data and do not provide prompt-injection or toxicity blocking. Use synthetic examples to measure detection and false positives for your workload.

A customer example: ZoomInfo

ZoomInfo's case study describes more than 1,300 engineers across geographies using Requesty for AI access. Provider credentials stay in the gateway, while engineers use Requesty keys. Arkady Landes, Senior Cloud DevOps Manager at ZoomInfo, describes the buying decision:

"We evaluated over seven different gateways. At our scale, over 1,300 engineers across multiple geographies, we needed something that was enterprise-ready. Not just routing, but real governance: RBAC, approved models, cost controls, audit trails. That's what made the difference."

Landes also said: "Every engineer wanting to access AI at ZoomInfo now has to go through Requesty!" The published customer statement describes the same credential boundary.

Run the same proof of concept on each gateway

Use a small test organization, synthetic data and the enterprise edition you intend to buy. Give security, platform engineering and procurement the same evidence packet.

1. 1
   Record the deployment and identity path

   Identify the data-plane operator, control-plane location and upstream providers. Connect a test IdP group. Add and remove a user, then test their session and personal key. Test a separate workload service account after the user leaves. For Kong, demonstrate how identity maps to AI consumer permissions. Test Dev Portal mapping separately.

2. 2
   Prove model and key boundaries

   Give one test key an approved model and deny another existing model. Send both requests and inspect the result and upstream logs. Repeat with multiple groups, a directly attached key policy, each required modality and every fallback target. For Bifrost, test combined Access Profiles: adding a profile can widen access, and a group budget can allow calls after a personal budget is exhausted. Every charged group budget must still have room for the request.

3. 3
   Exercise budgets and sensitive-data controls

   Set a low test budget and send concurrent calls near the limit. Compare gateway totals with provider usage, record any overshoot and verify the alert reaches its destination. Send synthetic PII and secrets in different message positions; check the provider receives the intended masked content and measure missed detections and false positives. Test streaming and non-streaming output separately. Inspect payload logging and retained metadata under each privacy setting.

4. 4
   Check regions, records and recovery

   Try an allowed and a disallowed gateway region. Confirm inference, fallback, logs and guardrail locations with the vendor. Export an admin change and an inference record, then locate a denied attempt. Test provider failure and recovery under your routing policy, and agree on incident response and retention with the operator. For self-operated gateways, review release provenance and incident response: LiteLLM's October 21 incident affected specified public artifacts, while its private Enterprise registry was not affected. LiteLLM published its canonical attack-chain investigation after the initial report.

For a Requesty pilot, set REQUESTY_API_KEY to the scoped Requesty API key you created for the pilot. Then list the chat models visible to that key using the models endpoint:

curl https://router.requesty.ai/v1/models \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $REQUESTY_API_KEY"

This endpoint lists chat models only. Use the all-models endpoint to inspect other modalities, and send requests to test enforcement. For an EU-restricted organization, use https://router.eu.requesty.ai/v1/models. Send an approved request and an unapproved request with the same key. Confirm the denied request reports the intended policy error and did not reach the provider. For each request, record the key, selected model, gateway region, expected result, observed result and evidence location.

Download the enterprise AI gateway checklist

Use the checklist's Download button to save a Markdown copy. Duplicate the evidence-record line for each control in the downloaded file.

Choose the operating model first

Pick Bifrost or LiteLLM when your team must operate the gateway. Pick Portkey for a Prisma AIRS or hybrid purchase, Kong for an existing Kong estate, and TrueFoundry when the gateway is part of a wider model platform. Pick Requesty for managed access across providers.

This week, start the pilot by offboarding one test user in the IdP and confirming their personal keys stop working. To evaluate Requesty, sign up and contact the team about Enterprise onboarding; SSO and shared Group Budget mode require support enablement.