AI Gateway HQ vs LiteLLM

Written by Published

The question that decides it: Who should operate the gateway and own its deployment boundary?

Our verdict

Evaluate AI Gateway HQ when you want a hosted control service. Evaluate LiteLLM when operating the gateway in your own infrastructure is a requirement and you can support it.

Why

The primary difference is operational ownership. AI Gateway HQ runs a hosted service; LiteLLM’s catalogue entry is a self-hosted gateway with an MIT core. A free software license does not pay for infrastructure, upgrades, monitoring or enterprise features. LiteLLM documentation; AI Gateway HQ deployment limits.

AI Gateway HQ publishes a successful-request usage meter and alternative subscriptions. LiteLLM’s enterprise terms are sales-led. Compare the same workload and include operational labor; a token-markup comparison alone misses these costs.

Both offer familiar client interfaces, but an API compatibility label does not migrate model aliases, policies, credentials, logging or retry behavior. Test your actual requests and failure cases. AI Gateway HQ’s hosted processing and conditional retention posture also differ from a customer-operated data plane.

Which one, concretely

Choose AI Gateway HQ if

  • You want a hosted service rather than running gateway infrastructure
  • You want to evaluate prepaid and organization/key budget boundaries

Choose LiteLLM if

  • You need to operate the gateway in your own infrastructure
  • You want an open-source core and can manage its operational lifecycle

What catches people out

Side by side

Interpret these fields: How much does an LLM gateway lock you in? · LLM gateway compliance: SOC 2, HIPAA and evidence · How LLM gateway failover actually works

4 of 5 fields differ, marked with a dot. Every figure links to the vendor page it came from. Blank values read Not published rather than No — silence from a vendor is not a negative answer.

Field AI Gateway HQ LiteLLM
Ease of leaving Derived score, higher is easier 64/84 Some work to leave 100/100 Easy to leave
Licence Licence Proprietary hosted service MIT
Cost to run it yourself Self-host cost Design engagement from $60,000/year; not a ready-to-run deployment license. OSS is free (MIT); you pay only for your own containers plus Postgres and Redis. Enterprise features (SSO, RBAC, JWT auth, SCIM, audit logs, support SLAs) require a paid LiteLLM commercial license whose price is not published.
How pricing works, briefly Pricing model detail Flex usage meter or Company subscription; provider inference is separate. Portfolio has a separate sponsor boundary. OSS $0 free forever, self-hosted. Enterprise is talk-to-sales, sized to annual gateway request capacity, deployment architecture and support needs — 'never per token'. Volume discount tiers exist but no minimum amount is published.
Does your prompt reach their servers Prompt transits vendor Yes No
OpenAI Responses endpoint POST /v1/responses Yes Yes

for AI Gateway HQ and for LiteLLM. Want more fields, or a third option in the mix? Open these two in the full comparison tool.

Common questions

Is LiteLLM free compared with AI Gateway HQ?

LiteLLM has an MIT core, but infrastructure, operations and any enterprise license still matter. AI Gateway HQ charges for hosted gateway usage or a selected subscription; provider inference is separate.

Read the background

A head-to-head assumes you have already decided you want a gateway and are choosing between two. If you are earlier than that, these cover the ground this page skips.