OpenRouter vs LiteLLM
The question that decides it: Do you want one commercial relationship and one bill, or do you want to hold every provider account and key yourself?
Our verdict
If you want to call a model this afternoon with one account, one key and one invoice, OpenRouter, and the 5.5% credit fee is the price of not doing procurement. If you already have accounts with the providers you use, or anything about your data path has to stay inside infrastructure you control, LiteLLM: it is MIT, it costs nothing per request, and it is the only one of the two you can run air-gapped.
Why
These are not two versions of the same product. OpenRouter is managed only and LiteLLM is self-host only, so the deployment question is settled before any feature comparison starts. If you cannot run a container with Postgres and Redis behind it, LiteLLM is not available to you. If your data cannot leave infrastructure you control, OpenRouter is not available to you. Most teams find one of those two sentences decides the page.
The money works in opposite directions. OpenRouter publishes zero token markup and takes 5.5% when you buy credits, with a minimum of $0.80 per card purchase, so small top-ups are punitive and large ones are close to the headline rate. LiteLLM charges nothing at all: no markup, no credit fee, no seats. What it charges instead is your time and your infrastructure, and the worked example on our cost page assumes $40 a month of compute and database to run it, which is a guess about your setup rather than a published price.
The real difference is who holds the provider relationship. Through OpenRouter you have one account and one key, and OpenRouter has the accounts with the upstream providers. That is the entire convenience, and it is substantial: no negotiating, no per-vendor onboarding, no separate invoices, and a pool of 83 providers behind 400 to 500 models with automatic failover between them. With LiteLLM you bring your own keys to 140+ providers, which means you keep whatever rates, credits and contractual terms you have already negotiated, and you keep custody of the secrets.
On the compliance columns they are not comparable so much as differently shaped. OpenRouter publishes SOC 2, zero data retention, a zero-day retention window and metadata-only logging, which is a real audited posture from a vendor you are trusting. LiteLLM publishes no SOC 2 report, because there is no service to audit: the posture is whatever your own deployment has, which is either much better or much worse than OpenRouter depending entirely on you. LiteLLM is also the only side that can run air-gapped.
Which one, concretely
Choose OpenRouter if
- You want one account, one key and one invoice instead of provider-by-provider procurement
- You want the widest catalogue here — 83 providers, 400 to 500 models — with failover across them
- You have no appetite for operating a proxy, a database and a cache
- You need an audited SOC 2 posture and cannot produce one yourself
Choose LiteLLM if
- Nothing may leave infrastructure you control, including air-gapped environments
- You already hold accounts and negotiated rates with the providers you use
- You want zero per-request cost and are willing to pay in operations instead
- You want the routing layer in version control — LiteLLM is config-as-code, OpenRouter is not
What catches people out
- OpenRouter's 5.5% is charged when you add funds, not when you spend them, and the $0.80 card minimum makes a $5 top-up an effective 16%
- LiteLLM's SSO, RBAC, JWT auth, SCIM and audit logs are not in the MIT build — they need a commercial licence whose price is not published
- Neither publishes a model total you should lean on: LiteLLM states none at all, and OpenRouter's own pages range from 400 counted to 500+ advertised
- LiteLLM is self-host only, so "just try the hosted one" is not an option the way it is with most of this catalogue
Side by side
4 of 10 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 | OpenRouter | LiteLLM |
|---|---|---|
| Ease of leaving Derived score, higher is easier | 64/100 Some work to leave | 100/100 Easy to leave |
| Content guardrails Content guardrails | No | Yes |
| Strips personal data PII redaction | No | Yes |
| Similar-question caching Semantic cache | No | Yes |
| Settings can live in version control Declarative config-as-code | No | Yes |
| Runs fully disconnected Air-gapped deployment | Not published | Yes |
| SOC 2 audited SOC 2 audited | Yes | Not published |
| Does not retain your data Zero data retention | Yes | Not published |
| Can use your own provider accounts BYOK supported | Yes | Yes |
| GitHub stars GitHub stars | Not published | 57,500 |
| Requests per second ceiling Throughput | Not published | 2,800 rps |
Verified 3 days ago for OpenRouter and Verified 3 days ago for LiteLLM. Want more fields, or a third option in the mix? Open these two in the full comparison tool.
Common questions
Is LiteLLM actually free?
The gateway is MIT licensed and free forever, including virtual keys, teams, budgets, load balancing and rate limits. You pay for your own containers, Postgres and Redis, and you pay the model providers directly. SSO, RBAC, SCIM, audit logs and support SLAs sit behind a commercial licence whose price is not published.
Can I self-host OpenRouter?
No. OpenRouter is managed only. If self-hosting is a requirement, LiteLLM is the comparison to be making, and OpenRouter is not a candidate.
Which one has more models?
OpenRouter, as far as anyone can verify. It advertises 500+ and a live call to its public models endpoint returned 396. LiteLLM publishes no aggregate model total anywhere; its README says "100+ LLMs" and its documentation expresses coverage per provider. On providers, LiteLLM leads with 140+ against OpenRouter's 83.
Do I still need provider accounts if I use OpenRouter?
No, and that is the point of it. OpenRouter holds the upstream relationships and bills you for credits. With LiteLLM the opposite is true: you bring a key for every provider you want to reach.