Compare up to four
Every value links to the page it came from, so you can check any figure in one click. Blank cells read "Not published" rather than "No" — we do not treat silence as a negative answer. Turn on Technical in the header for the finer fields and precise terminology.
OpenRouter vs LiteLLM vs Vercel AI Gateway at a glance
The three products people most often weigh against each other, on the twelve fields that usually decide it. Use the tool above for any other combination, or for all 113 fields.
| Attribute | OpenRouter | LiteLLM | Vercel AI Gateway |
|---|---|---|---|
| What kind of product | Managed marketplace | Open source | Managed gateway |
| Who runs it | Managed only | Self-host only | Managed only |
| Models available | 500 | Not published | 360 |
| Markup on model prices | None | None | None |
| Fee to add funds | 5.5% | None | None |
| Monthly cost per person | Not published | None | $20/user/mo |
| Can use your own provider accounts | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Does not retain your data | Yes | Not published | Yes |
| Will sign a HIPAA agreement | Not published | Not published | Yes |
| SOC 2 audited | Yes | Not published | Yes |
| Prompt cache offered | Passes provider caching through | Both exact and semantic | No gateway-owned cache |
| Licence | Proprietary | MIT | Proprietary |
"Not published" means the vendor has not stated a figure. It is not a No. Model counts are not comparable across vendors, because counting conventions differ — treat them as an order of magnitude, not a score. Every value here is sourced on the provider pages, and the methodology explains how it was checked.
Pairs we have written up
The tool above compares any combination. These twelve also come with a verdict, the single question that decides them, and the traps to watch for.
- OpenRouter Vercel AI Gateway Do you need the long tail of the model catalog, or do you already pay Vercel for seats?
- OpenRouter Requesty Do you bring your own provider keys, and do you need a completed SOC 2 attestation today?
- LiteLLM Portkey Do you want to build and run the governance layer yourself, or pay for one that already exists?
- LiteLLM Bifrost Do you value provider breadth and a large operator community, or a Go runtime without a documented throughput ceiling?
- Portkey Helicone Are you starting something new, or do you already run Helicone and are deciding whether to stay?
- Helicone Braintrust Gateway Do you want to measure production traffic after the fact, or gate quality before you ship?
- Amazon Bedrock Google Vertex AI Which cloud already holds your data, and do you need FedRAMP High or explicit per-feature ZDR documentation?
- Amazon Bedrock Azure AI Foundry Do you need first-party OpenAI models and catalog breadth, or AWS-native governance and FedRAMP High?
- Cloudflare AI Gateway Vercel AI Gateway Which platform do you already deploy on, and do you need documented gateway-level compliance?
- Groq Together AI Is perceived output speed your product differentiator, or do you need catalog breadth, fine-tuning and a HIPAA BAA?
- Fireworks AI Together AI Do you need selectable latency tiers and reinforcement fine-tuning, or broader modality coverage and cheaper supervised fine-tuning?
- Kong AI Gateway Apache APISIX AI Gateway Do you need LLM-native features and compliance paperwork, or is free and fast with basic proxying enough?
- OpenRouter LiteLLM Do you want one commercial relationship and one bill, or do you want to hold every provider account and key yourself?
- OpenRouter Portkey Do you need to reach the most models, or to control how your team uses the ones you already reach?
- LiteLLM Cloudflare AI Gateway Do you want the gateway inside your infrastructure, or at an edge you never have to run?
- Vercel AI Gateway LiteLLM Are the seats already on your invoice, and can you tolerate a gateway you cannot self-host?
- Portkey Kong AI Gateway Is this a new AI product to adopt, or one more route on the API gateway your platform team already operates?
- Amazon Bedrock OpenRouter Does the model call have to stay inside your AWS account and its compliance boundary?