Grouped by what each one actually is, because the categories are not interchangeable. A marketplace and an inference provider solve different problems, and comparing their prices directly will mislead you.
One account and one key gets you hundreds of models from dozens of providers. Fastest way to start, widest catalog, least control over the data path.
Hosted marketplace that routes one OpenAI-compatible API to models from many inference providers.
US company · EU region available
Acquisition pending
Best for Teams that want the broadest possible model and provider catalog behind one OpenAI-compatible key with unified billing.
Hosted router with a flat 5% fee on inference, EU data residency and enterprise governance controls.
UK company · EU region available
Best for European teams that want one router with EU data residency, PII scrubbing and a predictable flat 5% fee.
A hosted control plane in front of the models: routing, caching, guardrails, spend limits, and logs. You trade a little simplicity for governance.
Multi-provider gateway inside Braintrust's eval and observability platform, with caching and span-level tracing.
US company · EU region available
Best for Teams that already run evals and tracing in Braintrust and want their model traffic to flow through the same platform.
Open-source LLM observability platform with an OpenAI-compatible AI gateway attached.
US company · EU region available
Maintenance mode
Best for Teams whose main need is per-request, per-user LLM observability with a thin gateway bolted on, ideally self-hosted.
AI plugins on the Kong API gateway, adding LLM routing, guardrails and token limits to existing API infrastructure.
US company
Best for Enterprises already standardized on Kong for API management that want AI traffic governed by the same gateway, plugins and ops tooling.
Managed EU-hosted AI gateway and router bundled with evaluation, observability and governance tooling.
Netherlands company · EU region available
Best for European teams that want an EU-resident managed gateway with governance, evaluations and observability in one platform rather than a bare proxy.
Open-core AI gateway with a hosted control plane for observability, prompt management and governance.
US company
Acquired
Best for Teams that want governance, guardrails and prompt management in one control plane, with the option to self-host the routing engine.
Vercel-operated gateway that routes AI SDK and OpenAI-format requests to many providers with zero token markup.
US company
Best for Teams already shipping on Vercel with the AI SDK who want zero token markup and no credit-purchase fee.
You run the gateway yourself. Full control over the data path and no per-request vendor fee, in exchange for operating it.
AI proxy plugins for the Apache APISIX API gateway, adding LLM routing and token limits to an OpenResty data plane.
US company
Best for Teams already running APISIX that want basic multi-provider LLM proxying, retries and token-based rate limiting without adding another gateway.
Go-based open-source AI gateway focused on low proxy overhead, with an enterprise tier for clustering and SSO.
US company
Best for Teams that want a fast Go gateway they can self-host for free and later buy clustering, SSO and guardrails from a single vendor.
Open-source AI gateway and Python SDK that puts one OpenAI-compatible API in front of many LLM providers.
US company
Best for Platform teams that want a free, self-hosted, maximally broad provider abstraction with virtual keys and budgets, at moderate request volumes.
AGPL-licensed OpenAI-compatible gateway available as one self-hosted Docker image or a hosted service with credit fees.
US company
Best for Small teams that want an OpenRouter-style hosted gateway with a genuine zero-cost self-host escape hatch and no token markup.
A hyperscaler surface offering several vendors models under one contract, one bill, and one identity system. Strong compliance story, limited to that cloud.
AWS-managed service for calling foundation models from 19 model providers through one AWS API.
US company
Best for Teams already standardized on AWS that need many model vendors behind one IAM-governed, compliance-attested API.
Microsoft's Azure platform for deploying models from its own and partner catalogs, now branded Microsoft Foundry.
US company · EU region available
Best for Microsoft-centric enterprises that want first-party OpenAI models plus a very large partner catalog under Azure governance.
Edge proxy in front of a curated set of AI providers, with caching, rate limiting, DLP and analytics.
US company
Best for Teams already on Cloudflare Workers who want free caching, analytics, spend limits, DLP and guardrails at the edge.
Google Cloud's model platform for Gemini plus 200+ Model Garden models, now branded Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform.
US company · EU region available
Best for Google Cloud customers who want Gemini alongside third-party models with strong, explicitly documented EU residency and ZDR controls.
Closed-source enterprise AI gateway sold on request tiers, deployable as SaaS or inside the customer's own cloud.
India company
Best for Enterprises that want a fully managed or in-VPC AI gateway with guardrails, MCP governance and SSO/RBAC, and are comfortable with closed source.
Hosts open-weight models on its own hardware. Often the cheapest or fastest route to a specific open model, but it is one source, not a router.
Inference provider serving open-weight models on its own stack, with fine-tuning and dedicated deployments.
US company
Best for Teams wanting fast serving of open-weight models with tiered latency options and both supervised and reinforcement fine-tuning.
Inference provider running open-weight models on its own LPU hardware for very high output speed.
US company · no EU region
Best for Latency-sensitive, user-facing applications on open-weight models where output speed matters more than catalog breadth.
Inference provider running open-weight models on its own GPUs, with fine-tuning and dedicated endpoints.
US company
Best for Teams that want a broad open-weight catalog plus cheap fine-tuning and the option to move to dedicated GPUs on one vendor.
Nothing meets all of those requirements at once. Loosen one — the wizard will tell you which requirement is costing you the most options.