# OpenRouter alternatives: where to route next

We compared 20 OpenRouter alternatives, from routers and gateways to inference clouds, on cost, control, latency and compliance. LiteLLM is the pick for self-hosting, Requesty for a drop-in swap, Groq for latency, DeepInfra for cheap open models, AWS Bedrock for enterprise and LLM API for mixed modalities.

Published: 2026-09-21
Updated: 2026-10-23
Canonical: https://llmapi.ai/openrouter-alternatives/

**The comparison at a glance**

- Alternatives compared: 20
- Questions in the planner: 10
- Criteria applied to each: 10
- Paid placements: 0
- Facts checked: 21 September 2026

OpenRouter got you started; these OpenRouter alternatives are where to route next. We compared 20 routers, gateways and inference clouds on cost, control, latency and compliance, with the same ten criteria for every entry and no paid placements. Answer ten questions in the route planner and get a shortlist built for your stack, not a generic top ten.

## Why teams look elsewhere

Four reasons people outgrow a single router, and they are rarely about the model list.

- **A fee on every token**: A platform margin of about 5% on top of provider prices is invisible at prototype volume and a real line item at production volume. Routers that bill provider rates, or let you bring your own keys, close that gap.
- **Prompts that cannot travel**: Once legal reviews the data path, a US-only proxy in front of your prompts stops being acceptable. Regional hosting, self-hosted gateways and cloud platforms keep traffic inside a perimeter you can name.
- **Latency budgets**: Voice agents and live UX spend their whole budget in the first second. A direct inference provider with no extra hop usually beats any router on speed, whatever the catalogue says.
- **Control and visibility**: Per-team budgets, spend caps, traces, caching and one invoice stop being nice-to-have the moment a second team starts calling models on the company card.

**When to stay on OpenRouter:** you are prototyping, you want one bill across hundreds of models, and a small fee is cheaper than running infrastructure. The planner says so too when that is the honest answer.

## What the gateway itself costs you

Token prices are roughly the same wherever you route; the difference is the fee sitting on top. Drag the slider to your monthly spend.

| Gateway | Fee shape | Fee a year at $100 a month | Fee a year at $1,000 a month | Fee a year at $10,000 a month | Fee a year at $100,000 a month |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| LiteLLM (self-hosted) | no fee — you run the servers | No fee | No fee | No fee | No fee |
| Portkey | $49 / month flat | $588 | $588 | $588 | $588 |
| Cloudflare AI Gateway | 5% on billed usage | $60 | $600 | $6,000 | $60,000 |
| Requesty | 5% of spend | $60 | $600 | $6,000 | $60,000 |
| OpenRouter | 5.5% on credit top-ups | $66 | $660 | $6,600 | $66,000 |

Gateway fee only: the tokens are billed on top and cost about the same everywhere. Percentage fees scale with you; a flat fee stops growing. Self-hosting costs nothing in fees, but you pay for servers and the engineer who keeps them up. Fee shapes are taken from each vendor's own pricing page, checked 21 September 2026; the full working is in [how we compared 20 OpenRouter alternatives](/blog/how-we-compared-20-openrouter-alternatives/).

## Ten questions to your shortlist

Answer each question and the planner ranks the alternatives by how well their tags match your answers.

1. **What are you building?** Prototype or side project; Production feature; High-volume workload; Enterprise or regulated app.
2. **What are you routing?** Text only; Text and images; Voice and speech; Everything, including video.
3. **Which models does your stack lean on?** Proprietary frontier models; Open weights on fast silicon; A mix of both.
4. **Where does it need to run?** Managed cloud is fine; EU or regional hosting; Self-hosted or on-prem.
5. **What do the privacy rules demand?** Zero data retention; HIPAA, SOC 2 or GDPR paperwork; Standard commercial terms.
6. **How should keys and billing work?** One balance, one invoice; Bring your own provider keys; Against a cloud commitment.
7. **What should the router do in the path?** Fail over automatically; Chase the fastest response; Cache and cap spend; Nothing — just pass it through.
8. **What matters most?** Lowest cost per token; Uptime and failover; One invoice and spend control; Reselling under my own brand.
9. **What is pushing you off OpenRouter?** The fee on every token; Where the prompts travel; The extra hop; Budgets, logs and guardrails.
10. **How much work can the switch take?** A base URL and a key; A few days of integration; We can run the thing ourselves.

## Editor's picks by need

If you already know which wall you hit, start here.

- **Best for mixed modalities: LLM API**: Text, vision, speech, video and OCR behind one OpenAI-compatible key, with uptime monitoring and spend controls. Runner-up: Google Vertex AI.
- **Best self-hosted: LiteLLM**: An open-source proxy for 100+ providers with virtual keys, budgets and fallbacks, the closest thing to OpenRouter you can run inside your own perimeter. Runner-up: Kong AI Gateway.
- **Best drop-in swap: Requesty**: The same one-key, one-bill shape with cost-aware routing and caching on top. Migration is a base URL and a key, nothing else. Runner-up: Unify.
- **Lowest latency: Groq**: Purpose-built inference hardware for open-weight models. The pick when voice agents or real-time UX own the latency budget. Runner-up: Fireworks AI.
- **Cheapest open models: DeepInfra**: Aggressive per-token pricing on Llama, Qwen, DeepSeek and friends, on an OpenAI-compatible API with no platform fee layered on top. Runner-up: Together AI.
- **Best for enterprise: AWS Bedrock**: Frontier and open models under the AWS contract, IAM boundary and compliance paperwork your procurement team already signed off. Runner-up: Azure AI Foundry.

## Every alternative, side by side

OpenRouter and the 19 alternatives on model access, modalities, hosting, routing and pricing shape.

**OpenRouter and 19 alternatives by model access, modalities, hosting, routing and pricing shape**

| Alternative | Model access | Modalities | Hosting | Routing & failover | Pricing shape |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| OpenRouter (baseline) | 400+ text models | Text, some vision | Managed cloud | Automatic provider fallback | Provider price + platform fee, prepaid credits |
| [LLM API](https://llmapi.ai/models/) (that's us) | 396 models, 37+ providers | Text, vision, speech, video, OCR | Managed cloud, EU region | Failover + live uptime monitoring | Prepaid credits, pay per token, an invoice for every top-up |
| Together AI | 200+ open models | Text, image, embeddings | Managed cloud | Single provider, no cross-vendor failover | Per token, plus hourly dedicated GPUs |
| Fireworks AI | 100+ open models | Text, vision, audio, image | Managed cloud | Single provider | Per token, plus on-demand GPU hours |
| Groq | ~20 curated models | Text, speech-to-text | Managed cloud | Single provider | Per token, free developer tier |
| DeepInfra | 100+ open models | Text, image, speech, embeddings | Managed cloud | Single provider | Per token, pay as you go |
| Novita AI | 200+ hosted models | Text, image, video, speech | Managed cloud | Single provider | Per token or per generation |
| Replicate | Thousands of community models | Image, video, audio, text | Managed cloud | None | Per second of compute |
| AWS Bedrock | ~50 models from selected vendors | Text, image, embeddings | Managed cloud, many regions incl. EU | Cross-region inference, no cross-vendor routing | Per token, on your AWS bill; provisioned throughput available |
| Azure AI Foundry | OpenAI + 1000s of catalogue models | Text, image, speech, vision | Managed cloud, EU data boundary | Regional deployments, no cross-vendor routing | Per token or provisioned units, on the Azure bill |
| Google Vertex AI | Gemini + model garden | Text, image, video, speech | Managed cloud, EU regions | Regional endpoints, no cross-vendor routing | Per token or per media unit, on the GCP bill |
| Portkey | Bring your own provider keys | Whatever your providers support | Managed cloud or self-hosted | Conditional routing, retries, fallbacks | Per request tiers, free developer plan, enterprise self-host |
| LiteLLM | 100+ providers via your own keys | Whatever your providers support | Self-hosted (managed tier available) | Load balancing, retries, fallbacks | Free and open source, paid enterprise tier |
| Kong AI Gateway | Bring your own provider keys | Whatever your providers support | Self-hosted or hybrid | Policy-based routing and rate limits | Open source core, enterprise licence |
| Cloudflare AI Gateway | Bring your own keys + Workers AI | Text, image, speech via Workers AI | Managed edge, EU options | Fallbacks, caching, rate limits | Free tier, usage-based extras |
| Anyscale | Your own model deployments | Whatever you deploy | Your cloud account / VPC | You build it | Platform fee on top of your own compute |
| Hugging Face Inference | Open models via partner providers | Text, image, audio, embeddings | Managed cloud | Provider selection per model | Free credits, then pass-through provider pricing |
| Requesty | 150+ hosted models | Text, vision | Managed cloud | Cost-aware routing and fallbacks | Usage fee on top of provider prices |
| Eden AI | 100+ AI services across vendors | Text, OCR, speech, image, translation | Managed cloud, EU company | Provider fallback per task | Per call, with a monthly plan |
| Unify | Major providers and open models | Text | Managed cloud | Live benchmark-based routing | Provider price plus routing fee |

Facts are checked against each vendor's own documentation and pricing pages on 21 September 2026. Model counts move weekly, so treat them as orders of magnitude, not guarantees.

## Coverage at a glance

Every alternative against twelve capabilities. Yes means the platform covers it as a first-class capability; No means it does not, with no half-credit for "on the roadmap".

**Coverage at a glance, twelve capabilities per alternative**

| Alternative | Text | Vision | Speech | Video | Managed cloud | EU hosting | Self-host | Failover | Unified billing | White label | Enterprise | Drop-in swap |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| LLM API | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| OpenRouter | Yes | Yes | No | No | Yes | No | No | No | No | No | No | Yes |
| Anyscale | Yes | No | No | No | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | No | Yes | No |
| AWS Bedrock | Yes | Yes | No | No | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | No |
| Azure AI Foundry | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | No |
| Cloudflare AI Gateway | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | No | No | No | Yes |
| DeepInfra | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | No | No | No | No | No | No | Yes |
| Eden AI | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | No | No | Yes | No | No | Yes |
| Fireworks AI | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | No | No | Yes | No | No | No | Yes |
| Google Vertex AI | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | No |
| Groq | Yes | No | Yes | No | Yes | No | No | No | No | No | No | Yes |
| Hugging Face Inference | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | No | No | No | No | No | No | Yes |
| Kong AI Gateway | Yes | No | No | No | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | No |
| LiteLLM | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | No | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | No | No | No |
| Novita AI | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | No | No | No | No | No | Yes |
| Portkey | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | Yes |
| Replicate | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | No | No | No | No | No | No |
| Requesty | Yes | Yes | No | No | Yes | No | No | No | Yes | No | No | Yes |
| Together AI | Yes | Yes | No | No | Yes | No | No | No | No | No | No | Yes |
| Unify | Yes | No | No | No | Yes | No | No | Yes | No | No | No | Yes |

## The 20 profiles

What each one actually is, who it suits, and the part their marketing page leaves out.

### OpenRouter

A marketplace-style router in front of hundreds of hosted models, with a single OpenAI-compatible endpoint, credits-based billing and automatic fallbacks between upstream providers.

- **Best for:** trying many models quickly, side projects, teams that want the widest text-model catalogue without contracts.
- **Watch out for:** a per-request fee sits on top of provider prices, support is community-first, and speech, video and OCR coverage is thin compared with the text catalogue.
- **Pricing shape:** provider price + platform fee, prepaid credits.
- **Site:** [openrouter.ai](https://openrouter.ai)

### LLM API

A managed router covering 396 models from 37+ providers behind one key, with per-model uptime monitoring, spend controls, and a white-label router other companies resell under their own brand.

- **Best for:** teams running mixed modalities in production, agencies and platforms that need one bill, and companies reselling AI access.
- **Watch out for:** no self-hosted edition; the gateway runs as a managed service.
- **Pricing shape:** Prepaid credits, pay per token, an invoice for every top-up.
- **Site:** [the model catalogue](https://llmapi.ai/models/)

### Together AI

An inference cloud running open-weight models on its own GPU fleet, plus fine-tuning and dedicated capacity for steady workloads.

- **Best for:** open-model workloads at volume where per-token price and throughput matter more than closed-model access.
- **Watch out for:** no access to closed frontier models from OpenAI or Anthropic through the same endpoint.
- **Pricing shape:** per token, plus hourly dedicated GPUs.
- **Site:** [together.ai](https://together.ai)

### Fireworks AI

A performance-focused inference platform for open-weight models, with speculative decoding, LoRA tuning and on-demand deployments.

- **Best for:** latency-sensitive production apps built on open models.
- **Watch out for:** the catalogue is narrower than a marketplace router and closed frontier models are not included.
- **Pricing shape:** per token, plus on-demand GPU hours.
- **Site:** [fireworks.ai](https://fireworks.ai)

### Groq

Custom LPU hardware serving a curated set of open models at very high throughput through an OpenAI-compatible API.

- **Best for:** voice agents, streaming chat and anything where response speed is the product.
- **Watch out for:** a small catalogue, capacity limits at peak, and no cross-provider routing.
- **Pricing shape:** per token, free developer tier.
- **Site:** [groq.com](https://groq.com)

### DeepInfra

A low-cost inference provider with an OpenAI-compatible endpoint across open text, embedding, image and speech models.

- **Best for:** cost-sensitive batch and background workloads.
- **Watch out for:** fewer enterprise controls, lighter SLAs, no closed frontier models.
- **Pricing shape:** per token, pay as you go.
- **Site:** [deepinfra.com](https://deepinfra.com)

### Novita AI

An inference cloud spanning open LLMs plus image, video and speech generation, also available as GPU instances.

- **Best for:** media-heavy products that also need text models at low cost.
- **Watch out for:** quality of service varies by model; enterprise paperwork is lighter than a hyperscaler's.
- **Pricing shape:** per token or per generation.
- **Site:** [novita.ai](https://novita.ai)

### Replicate

A hosting layer for thousands of community-published models, including image, video and audio pipelines, with custom model deployment.

- **Best for:** generative media, experimentation and running your own containerised model.
- **Watch out for:** cold starts, per-second billing that is hard to forecast, and inconsistent model maintenance.
- **Pricing shape:** per second of compute.
- **Site:** [replicate.com](https://replicate.com)

### AWS Bedrock

Amazon's managed model service with Anthropic, Meta, Mistral, Amazon and other families, IAM controls, VPC access and regional isolation.

- **Best for:** enterprises already on AWS that need procurement, data residency and compliance more than catalogue breadth.
- **Watch out for:** model availability differs by region, quotas need raising, and the developer experience is heavier than a router.
- **Pricing shape:** per token, on your AWS bill; provisioned throughput available.
- **Site:** [aws.amazon.com/bedrock](https://aws.amazon.com/bedrock/)

### Azure AI Foundry

Microsoft's AI platform hosting OpenAI models alongside open and partner models, with private networking, content filters and EU data boundary options.

- **Best for:** Microsoft-committed enterprises needing OpenAI models with corporate compliance.
- **Watch out for:** deployment quotas per region, and the catalogue outside OpenAI is uneven.
- **Pricing shape:** per token or provisioned units, on the Azure bill.
- **Site:** [azure.microsoft.com](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/ai-foundry)

### Google Vertex AI

Google's managed platform for Gemini plus a model garden of partner and open models, with grounding, tuning and regional endpoints.

- **Best for:** teams standardising on Gemini, or needing long-context and multimodal models under GCP contracts.
- **Watch out for:** authentication and project setup are heavier than an API key; pricing differs per modality.
- **Pricing shape:** per token or per media unit, on the GCP bill.
- **Site:** [cloud.google.com/vertex-ai](https://cloud.google.com/vertex-ai)

### Portkey

A gateway that sits between your app and any provider key you bring, adding routing rules, caching, retries, budgets, logs and guardrails. Available managed or self-hosted.

- **Best for:** platform teams that already hold provider contracts and need control, tracing and spend limits.
- **Watch out for:** you still buy the models elsewhere; it is a control plane, not a catalogue.
- **Pricing shape:** per request tiers, free developer plan, enterprise self-host.
- **Site:** [portkey.ai](https://portkey.ai)

### LiteLLM

An MIT-licensed Python SDK and proxy that normalises 100+ provider APIs into the OpenAI format, with virtual keys, budgets and logging. Run it in your own cluster.

- **Best for:** engineering teams that want full control, no vendor in the data path, and provider prices with no markup.
- **Watch out for:** you own uptime, upgrades and scaling; the enterprise features sit behind a paid tier.
- **Pricing shape:** free and open source, paid enterprise tier.
- **Site:** [litellm.ai](https://litellm.ai)

### Kong AI Gateway

Kong's gateway extended with AI plugins for multi-provider routing, prompt guards, token rate limiting and semantic caching, deployable on-prem.

- **Best for:** enterprises that already standardise API traffic on Kong and want AI under the same policy layer.
- **Watch out for:** infrastructure-team territory, with no model catalogue and no consumer-grade onboarding.
- **Pricing shape:** open source core, enterprise licence.
- **Site:** [konghq.com](https://konghq.com/products/kong-ai-gateway)

### Cloudflare AI Gateway

A thin edge layer that proxies calls to providers, adding analytics, caching, retries and rate limits, with Workers AI for models hosted by Cloudflare.

- **Best for:** teams on Cloudflare who want cheap observability and caching without changing providers.
- **Watch out for:** not a catalogue or a billing layer; governance features are lighter than dedicated gateways.
- **Pricing shape:** free tier, usage-based extras.
- **Site:** [developers.cloudflare.com/ai-gateway](https://developers.cloudflare.com/ai-gateway/)

### Anyscale

A managed Ray platform for serving and fine-tuning models on your own infrastructure, including deployment into your VPC.

- **Best for:** ML teams with custom models and existing cloud commitments.
- **Watch out for:** the heaviest setup on this list, with no ready-made catalogue or router.
- **Pricing shape:** platform fee on top of your own compute.
- **Site:** [anyscale.com](https://anyscale.com)

### Hugging Face Inference

Inference providers on the Hub route calls to partners such as Together, Fireworks and Novita behind one token, alongside dedicated endpoints.

- **Best for:** open-model research, prototypes and anything already anchored on the Hub.
- **Watch out for:** no closed frontier models, and production guarantees depend on the upstream partner.
- **Pricing shape:** free credits, then pass-through provider pricing.
- **Site:** [huggingface.co](https://huggingface.co/inference-providers)

### Requesty

A multi-provider routing layer with caching, fallbacks, per-user budgets and analytics aimed at cutting model spend.

- **Best for:** teams whose main pain is an unpredictable model bill.
- **Watch out for:** a younger platform with a smaller catalogue and shorter operating history.
- **Pricing shape:** usage fee on top of provider prices.
- **Site:** [requesty.ai](https://requesty.ai)

### Eden AI

An aggregator covering OCR, translation, speech, moderation and generative models from many vendors under a single key and invoice, with an EU base.

- **Best for:** products that need document, speech and translation AI alongside LLMs.
- **Watch out for:** task-oriented rather than model-oriented; per-call pricing can exceed direct provider rates.
- **Pricing shape:** per call, with a monthly plan.
- **Site:** [edenai.co](https://edenai.co)

### Unify

A router that scores providers on live latency, throughput and cost, then sends each request to the endpoint that best matches your constraints.

- **Best for:** engineers who want routing decisions made on measurements rather than a fixed preference list.
- **Watch out for:** a smaller catalogue and community; best suited to text workloads.
- **Pricing shape:** provider price plus routing fee.
- **Site:** [unify.ai](https://unify.ai)

## Short version, by situation

**You are prototyping and want maximum choice.** Stay on OpenRouter, or use Hugging Face Inference. The per-request fee is irrelevant at small volume and the catalogue is the widest there is.

**You are in production across text, voice and video.** LLM API covers all four modalities behind one key with uptime monitoring and one bill. Novita AI is the budget alternative if you can accept lighter guarantees.

**Your security team wants nothing in the data path.** LiteLLM self-hosted, or Kong AI Gateway if you already run Kong. You keep provider prices with no markup and own the uptime.

**Procurement has to sign off.** AWS Bedrock, Azure AI Foundry or Google Vertex AI: the model spend lands on a cloud contract you already have, with residency and compliance attached.

## Switching from OpenRouter to LLM API

LLM API is OpenAI-compatible, so migration is a base URL and a key.

```python
from openai import OpenAI

client = OpenAI(
    base_url="https://api.llmapi.ai/v1",
    api_key="LLMAPI_KEY",
)
```

```ts
import OpenAI from 'openai';

const client = new OpenAI({
  baseURL: 'https://api.llmapi.ai/v1',
  apiKey: 'LLMAPI_KEY',
});
```

```bash
curl https://api.llmapi.ai/v1/models \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer LLMAPI_KEY"
```

## How we compared them

Ten criteria, applied the same way to every entry, from public documentation and hands-on use:

1. Model breadth and how fast new releases land
2. Modality coverage: text, vision, speech, video, OCR
3. Routing, retries and failover behaviour
4. Pricing shape: markup, credits, invoices, commitments
5. Spend controls, budgets and per-team reporting
6. Data residency and regional hosting
7. Self-hosting and the licence that comes with it
8. White-label and reseller support
9. Enterprise readiness: SLAs, SOC 2, procurement
10. Migration effort from an OpenAI-compatible endpoint

**What we could not measure.** Latency and uptime vary by region, model and hour, so we did not publish a single speed ranking: any number we quoted would be stale by the time you read it. Support quality is reported, not tested. Where a vendor does not publish a fact, the table says so instead of guessing.

Read the full methodology in [how we compared 20 OpenRouter alternatives](https://llmapi.ai/blog/how-we-compared-20-openrouter-alternatives/).

## Frequently asked questions

**Q: What is the best free OpenRouter alternative?**

A: For self-hosting, LiteLLM is open source and free to run: you pay only your upstream providers. For hosted, Cloudflare AI Gateway's core features are free and sit in front of your own provider keys.

**Q: Can I switch from OpenRouter without rewriting code?**

A: Usually yes. Most alternatives on this page expose an OpenAI-compatible endpoint, so you change the base URL, the API key and sometimes the model-ID format. The routing and pricing columns of the comparison flag the ones that need more than that.

**Q: Gateway or inference provider: what is the difference?**

A: A gateway routes your requests to providers you already pay and adds control: budgets, caching, logs, failover. An inference provider runs the models itself. Plenty of teams use both, a gateway in front and two or three providers behind it.

**Q: What does BYOK mean?**

A: Bring Your Own Key: you plug in your own OpenAI, Anthropic or Google keys, so those providers bill you directly and the router charges only for its own layer, or for nothing at all.

**Q: When should I just stay on OpenRouter?**

A: When you are prototyping, want the widest text catalogue with no contract, and the per-request fee is smaller than the cost of running anything yourself.

**Q: Is anyone paying to be on this list?**

A: No. LLM API is our own product and is labelled as such wherever it appears. Every other entry is here on merit, scored on the same criteria from public documentation and hands-on use.

Next step: [Get API key](https://app.llmapi.ai/signup)