A gateway filters requests. A policy engine proves what happened.
LiteLLM is a gateway that can filter requests. Swiftward is a policy engine that enforces rules, versions them, and proves what happened. They sit at different layers, and many teams run both.
Use them together
LiteLLM is good at what it does: routing across many providers, tracking spend, and adding simple guardrails. If you already run it, keep it. Put Swiftward in front of, or alongside, it for the parts a gateway does not do: versioned policy, stateful decisions, shadow testing, replay, human review, and an audit trail an auditor accepts.
Where Swiftward is different
A gateway evaluates a request in isolation. Swiftward remembers: counters, rate limits, reputation across events. A gateway's filters are settings you edit in place. Swiftward's policies are versioned artifacts you can roll back and replay. When something goes wrong, a gateway shows you a log; Swiftward replays the exact decision on the exact version that was live.
Honest about gaps
LiteLLM has a larger community and more one-click provider integrations than we do today. If breadth of providers is your main need and proof is not, it may be enough on its own.