The open-source API Gateway & AI Gateway
High-performance traffic management for APIs, microservices, and LLM workloads — dynamic routing, load balancing, authentication, observability, and 100+ plugins.
- 100+plugins
- ~18kQPS / core
- 0.2 msadded latency
- Apache 2.0licensed
Get started
Install APISIX and configure your first route in minutes.
Read the docs →Learn the concepts
API gateway, AI gateway, rate limiting, mTLS, Kubernetes and more.
Explore the learning center →Case studies
See how teams run Apache APISIX in production at scale.
Read case studies →The same gateway, now for your LLM traffic
Proxy, secure, and govern traffic to 20+ LLM providers — with the performance, plugins, and observability you already run for your APIs.
Multi-LLM proxy
Route to OpenAI, Anthropic, AWS Bedrock, DeepSeek, Ollama and 20+ providers through one endpoint.
LLM load balancing
Distribute traffic across providers and models for throughput and resilience.
Retry & fallback
Fail over to a backup model or provider automatically when one is unavailable.
Token rate limiting
Cap usage and cost with token-based rate limits per consumer.
Prompt security
Guardrails, content moderation, and prompt decoration before requests reach the model.
MCP support
Expose and govern Model Context Protocol tools through the gateway.
Building for large-scale, high value systems
Apache APISIX provides open source API Gateway to help you manage microservices, delivering the ultimate performance, security, and scalable platform for all your APIs and microservices.
Apache APISIX is based on NGINX and etcd. Compared with traditional API Gateways, APISIX has features like dynamic routing and hot-loading plugins, etc.
Why APISIX API Gateway?
Reduce time fighting bugs, focus on designing world-class systems with API Gateway
APISIX API Gateway offers nearly 100 open-source plugins, comprehensive API management capabilities, and advanced technical advantages.
Integrates with your stack
Connect APISIX to your observability, security, service discovery, and AI tools through 100+ plugins.
Performance
Ultimate performance
Apache APISIX Gateway uses radixtree-route-matching and etcd under the hood to provide you the ability to create high speed synchronized systems. From routing to built-in plugins, all these are designed and implemented to be uber performant with the minimum latency possible.
Security
Shield against the malicious
Apache APISIX Gateway provides multiple security plugins for identity authentication and API verification, including CORS, JWT, Key Auth, OpenID Connect (OIDC), Keycloak, etc. We put stability and security first. For more information, check here.
Scalability and availability
Scales with your users
Apache APISIX Gateway provides the ability to write your own custom plugins, use custom Load Balancing Algorithms during the balancer phase for scaling and custom Routing algorithms for fine control on routing.
Fully dynamic
Save dev-time, design what matters
As API Gateway, Apache APISIX provides Hot updates and Hot plugins, which continuously update configurations without restarts, saving development time and stress. In addition, health checks, circuit breakers, and many more features keep the system balanced.
Multi-platform and protocol
Create once, run anywhere
Platform agnostic, no vendor lock-in. Apache APISIX as API Management solution, can run from bare-metal to Kubernetes. It supports HTTP to gRPC transcoding, websockets, gRPC, Dubbo, MQTT proxy and multiple platforms including ARM64, don't worry about the lock-in of the infra technology.
Among the best, and always improving
Apache APISIX is an open-source API gateway and AI gateway — here is how it compares on performance and core capabilities.
| Feature | Apache APISIX | Other gateways |
|---|---|---|
| Single-core throughput | 18,000 QPS | ~1,700 QPS |
| Added latency | 0.2 ms | ~2 ms |
| AI gateway / LLM proxy | ||
| Fully open-source, no paywalled features | ||
| Dynamic, real-time configuration | ||
| Hot plugin reload, no restart |
Building API Gateway Together
Apache APISIX is open source and ever-growing.
Contributors are always welcome, reach out to us on GitHub.
Learn from developers
What are microservices? What is an API Gateway? Want to learn Apache APISIX usage, but don't know where to start? Check out our Docs.
Like visual information, check out our YouTube channel for detailed tutorials. Subscribe for more.
Try Apache APISIX today.
