From data-warehouse add-on to purpose-built LLM governance.
Databricks AI Gateway is a serving-endpoint feature inside the Databricks Lakehouse. It works well if your entire stack is Databricks. DVARA is a cloud-neutral, self-hostable governance layer with Policy-as-Code, argument-level MCP governance, and workspace isolation that a workspace-scoped feature cannot deliver.
Read from Databricks Mosaic AI Gateway's own documentation on 28 August 2026. A comparison in which we win everything is a marketing asset, not a comparison — so this is the part we would rather you knew before choosing.
Source: docs.databricks.com
DVARA leads or ties every row in this table — Databricks Mosaic AI Gateway does not come out ahead on any of them. That is unusual enough that you should check it rather than take it on trust: these rows are the capabilities we built the product around, so they are the ones we chose to compare, and a table chosen by us is not a neutral survey. Databricks Mosaic AI Gateway is likely to be the better tool where its own strengths lie — read its documentation alongside this.
| Feature | DVARA | Databricks AI Gateway |
|---|---|---|
| Multi-provider unified API | ✓ | ∼ |
| SSE streaming support | ✓ | ✓ |
| Structured outputs across providers | ✓ | — |
| Capability-aware route filtering | ✓ | — |
| Circuit breaker per provider | ✓ | — |
| Canary routing + A/B testing | ✓ | — |
| Weighted routing + failover | ✓ | — |
Databricks offers guardrails and workspace-level auth. DVARA adds policy-as-code, workspace isolation, and compliance evidence that the serving-endpoint model cannot support.
| Feature | DVARA | Databricks AI Gateway |
|---|---|---|
| Policy-as-Code engine (YAML DSL) | ✓ | — |
| Policy dry-run before activation | ✓ | — |
| Policy versioning + rollback | ✓ | — |
| Tamper-evident HMAC-signed audit trail | ✓ | ∼ |
| PII detection and redaction | ✓ | — |
| SOC2 / HIPAA / GDPR evidence packages | ✓ | ∼ |
| Reversible tokenisation | ✓ | — |
Databricks Unity AI Gateway governs MCP servers too. DVARA goes deeper — argument-level policy, PII on tool-call arguments, agent loop detection with auto-kill, and a unified LLM + MCP session timeline.
| Feature | DVARA | Databricks AI Gateway |
|---|---|---|
| MCP tool calls proxied and governed | ✓ | ✓ |
| MCP argument-level policy rules | ✓ | — |
| MCP PII scan on arguments + responses | ✓ | ∼ |
| Human approval gate (enforced at execution) | ✓ | — |
| Agent loop detection + auto-kill | ✓ | — |
| Agent-to-agent (A2A) hop governance | ✓ | — |
| Session timeline (LLM + MCP unified) | ✓ | ∼ |
Databricks couples credentials to the serving-endpoint lifecycle. DVARA treats credentials as an independent, workspace-scoped entity with first-class rotation.
| Feature | DVARA | Databricks AI Gateway |
|---|---|---|
| Workspace-scoped (BYOK) provider credentials | ✓ | — |
| Independent credential lifecycle (not endpoint-coupled) | ✓ | — |
| Multiple keys per provider per workspace | ✓ | — |
| Sub-second credential revocation | ✓ | — |
| In-product rotation UI | ✓ | ∼ |
| Feature | DVARA | Databricks AI Gateway |
|---|---|---|
| Real-time cost per request (USD) | ✓ | ∼ |
| Budget caps (soft + hard) per workspace | ✓ | — |
| Auto model downgrade on budget threshold | ✓ | — |
| Chargeback reports per workspace/team | ✓ | — |
| Feature | DVARA | Databricks AI Gateway |
|---|---|---|
| Self-hosted / on-prem deployment | ✓ | — |
| Air-gapped deployment | ✓ | — |
| Cloud-neutral (AWS / GCP / Azure / bare metal) | ✓ | ∼ |
| SSO via OIDC / SAML 2.0 | ✓ | ✓ |
| RBAC access control | ✓ | ✓ |
| Kubernetes Helm chart | ✓ | — |
Databricks AI Gateway is a sensible choice if your entire AI workload lives inside a single Databricks workspace. The moment you need multi-tenant isolation, cloud-neutral deployment, policy-as-code, argument-level MCP governance, or a credential lifecycle independent of serving endpoints, it hits architectural ceilings. DVARA is purpose-built for the governance layer that Databricks leaves to the consumer.
Run the LLM Gateway free in your own infrastructure, production included — a licence when you need the MCP and A2A planes with support.
The Databricks AI Gateway column describes what Databricks AI Gateway's public documentation said when we read it in June 2026 — a dash means we did not find the capability documented, not that the product cannot do it. Vendors ship continuously; check their docs before deciding. The DVARA column is a claim about our own code and is verified against the released tag.