Behest vs Legacy AI Gateways
They route. We operate.
Legacy gateways provide routing, observability, guardrails, virtual-key budgets, and a model catalog. Behest is the AI backend — auth, memory, tenant isolation, and Token FinOps in the request path.
Legacy Gateways
Legacy gateways sit between your app and LLM providers. They provide routing, fallback, caching, and observability for LLM API calls.
Strong at: Multi-provider routing, observability dashboards, request logging, cost analytics, and fallback/retry logic.
Category: AI Gateway / Observability
Behest
Behest is the AI backend. One API call gives you auth, memory, PII scrubbing, prompt defense, rate limiting, token budgets, kill switches, and observability — self-hosted in your cloud.
Strong at: Complete AI backend with security, multi-tenant isolation, built-in business logic, and usage tier economics.
Category: AI Backend as a Service
The core difference
Legacy gateways route requests and apply guardrails on the way through. Behest operates the backend — managing auth, tenant isolation, conversation memory, and per-session cost attribution as primary primitives, not as gateway-side metadata.
Feature Comparison
| Feature | Behest | Legacy Gateways |
|---|---|---|
| CORS Handling (browser-direct calls) | ? | |
| Multi-tenant Auth & Isolation | Partial | |
| Rate Limiting | ||
| PII Scrubbing (pre-LLM) | ||
| Prompt Injection Defense | ||
| Conversation Memory (managed) | ? | |
| System Prompts (managed) | ||
| Token Budgets (inline enforcement) | ||
| Kill Switches (global / tenant / project) | Partial | |
| Smart LLM Routing | ||
| Observability & Analytics | ||
| Multi-provider Support | ||
| Self-hosted Deployment | ||
| Per-session cost attribution | Partial | |
| Usage Tiers & Token Economics (built in) | ? |
"Partial" means the capability exists in a narrower form. "?" means the capability is not generally documented in publicly available materials.
Choose Legacy Gateways if you need...
- A gateway in front of your existing backend with routing, fallbacks, and PII guardrails
- Multi-provider routing across 200+ models with virtual-key budgets
- Per-user / per-team metadata-driven cost analytics
Choose Behest if you need...
- An AI backend that operates the request path — auth, memory, tenant isolation
- Browser-direct calls via CORS — no backend proxy required
- Per-session cost attribution surfaced in the FinOps view
- Token budgets, usage tiers, and monetization tools for your end users
- Self-hosted deployment in your own cloud
Need more than a gateway? Get the whole backend.
Auth, memory, PII scrubbing, prompt defense, rate limiting, token budgets, and observability — one API call.