Orq.ai Router vs Braintrust Gateway
The question that decides it: Is the surrounding platform an eval workbench or a governance layer, and does the gateway underneath it reach far enough?
Our verdict
Evaluation and scoring are the reason you are here, and a free tier matters: Braintrust Gateway, whose Starter plan is $0 and whose hosted gateway is free during public preview. You need air-gapped deployment, a published zero-data-retention position or reach beyond 100 models: Orq.ai Router, and accept 4.5% on credit.
Why
Neither of these is sold as a standalone gateway, and pretending otherwise leads to a bad decision. In both cases the router is a component of a larger product — evaluation and observability for Braintrust, evaluation and governance for Orq.ai — so you are picking a platform and inheriting its gateway. The question is which platform you want and whether its gateway is good enough.
Braintrust is the cheaper way in by a wide margin. Its Starter plan is $0 with unlimited users, and the hosted gateway itself is free during public preview with pricing to be announced before general availability. That last clause is the risk: a free preview with unannounced pricing is not a cost you can plan around, and it is the single thing to pin down before building on it. Its compliance record is solid — SOC 2, a HIPAA business associate agreement and EU data residency — but its zero-data-retention position is conditional rather than default and its stated retention is 14 days, the shortest in this pair.
Orq.ai reaches considerably further. It states 500 models against Braintrust's 100 across 9 upstream providers, and it supports air-gapped installation, which Braintrust does not publish. Its compliance record matches Braintrust's on SOC 2, HIPAA and EU residency and beats it on data handling: a published zero-data-retention position rather than a conditional one, plus a GDPR data processing agreement. The cost is 4.5% on credit purchases — levied on money you load rather than on each call, with no token markup on top.
Both make logging configurable with a documented off switch, both support bringing your own upstream provider keys, and both state they do not train on customer data. So the data-handling controls are comparable; it is the defaults and the ceiling that differ. If you want the eval workbench and can live with 100 models, Braintrust is the cheaper and simpler choice. If the gateway has to satisfy a security review and reach broadly, Orq.ai is the one built for that.
Which one, concretely
Choose Orq.ai Router if
- You need reach beyond 100 models — Orq.ai states 500
- You need air-gapped installation
- You want a published zero-data-retention position rather than a conditional one
- You want a GDPR data processing agreement alongside SOC 2 and a HIPAA BAA
Choose Braintrust Gateway if
- You want a $0 Starter plan with unlimited users
- Evaluation, scoring and span-level tracing are the primary reason for adopting it
- You want the gateway free during public preview while you trial it
- You are comfortable with 100 models across 9 upstream providers
What catches people out
- Braintrust's hosted gateway is free during public preview with pricing to be announced before GA — an unplannable cost.
- Braintrust's zero-data-retention position is conditional rather than default, and stated retention is 14 days.
- Braintrust reaches 100 models across 9 upstream providers, the narrowest reach in this pair by a wide margin.
- Orq.ai's 4.5% is charged on credit purchases rather than tokens, so it does not scale with call volume.
- Orq.ai publishes no retention figure at all, so confirm what is kept and for how long.
- Both bundle a larger platform around the gateway, so you may be paying for evaluation tooling you do not use.
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 19 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 | Orq.ai Router | Braintrust Gateway |
|---|---|---|
| Ease of leaving Derived score, higher is easier | 84/100 Some work to leave | 84/84 Some work to leave |
| What kind of product Category | Managed gateway | Managed gateway |
| Who runs it Deployment model | Managed or self-host | Managed or self-host |
| Licence Licence | Proprietary | MIT |
| Models available Models available | ~500 | ~100 |
| Model providers reachable Upstream providers | Not published | 9 |
| Markup on model prices Token markup | None | Not published |
| Fee to add funds Credit purchase fee | 4.5% | Not published |
| Monthly cost per person Seat fee | Not published | None |
| Runs fully disconnected Air-gapped deployment | Yes | Not published |
| SOC 2 audited SOC 2 audited | Yes | Yes |
| Will sign a HIPAA agreement HIPAA BAA | Yes | Yes |
| GDPR commitments GDPR commitments | Yes | Not published |
| Can keep data in the EU EU data residency | Yes | Yes |
| Does not retain your data Zero data retention | Yes | Depends how you deploy it |
| What gets logged Logged content | Your choice | Your choice |
| You can turn logging off Body-logging opt-out | Yes | Yes |
| How long they keep it Default content retention (days) | Not published | 14 days |
| Can use your own provider accounts BYOK supported | Yes | Yes |
| Free tier Free tier | Pay-as-you-go starts free: 100k spans, 1 GB processed data, 500 agent runs, unlimited AI Gateway seats, 100 req/min limit, 30-day retention. | Starter $0/month: unlimited users, $10 model credits, 1 GB processed data, 10k scores, 14-day retention. The Braintrust-hosted Gateway is free during public preview, with pricing to be announced before GA. |
for Orq.ai Router and for Braintrust Gateway. Want more fields, or a third option in the mix? Open these two in the full comparison tool.
Common questions
Is Braintrust Gateway free?
The Starter plan is $0 with unlimited users and $10 in model credits, and the Braintrust-hosted gateway is free during public preview. Pricing is to be announced before general availability, so the current cost is not something you can plan a budget around. Confirm the post-GA rate before building on it.
Which one reaches more models?
Orq.ai Router, by five times. It states 500 models where Braintrust Gateway states 100 across 9 upstream providers. If your requirement is access to a broad or fast-moving model catalog rather than deep evaluation tooling, that gap is the most decision-relevant difference between the two.
Do I have to adopt the whole platform to use either gateway?
Effectively, yes. Neither is sold as a standalone router: Braintrust wraps its gateway in evaluation and observability, and Orq.ai wraps its router in evaluation and governance tooling. Price and assess the full platform, because you will be paying for parts of it whether or not you use them.