The best LLM Gateways & Routing
Every option ranked — open-source, self-hostable, and commercial — by our transparent Sovereignty Score, with honest trade-offs so you choose what fits you, not us.
The layer between your application and the model providers — routing, failover, caching, virtual keys and spend limits. Hosted control planes compared against gateways you run yourself.
L4Models & tooling — layer 4 of the AI stack- 1
LiteLLM
Top pickOpen sourceOne OpenAI-compatible API in front of 100+ providers, running on your own box.
Free and self-hosted — you pay the model providers directly with no markup, plus hosting for a small VM (roughly $20–50/month). A paid enterprise tier exists for SSO, audit logs and support. · in our Portkey comparison →
What is LiteLLM? →90sovereignty - 2
Helicone
Open sourceGateway and observability in one proxy — Apache-2.0, now in maintenance under Mintlify.
Free and self-hostable under Apache-2.0. The hosted service has a free tier of roughly 10,000 requests per month, with paid plans starting around $79/month. · in our Portkey comparison →
What is Helicone? →88sovereignty - 3
Portkey Gateway (self-hosted)
Open sourcePortkey's own routing engine, MIT-licensed and running on your hardware.
Free — the gateway is MIT-licensed. You pay only your model providers and your own hosting. · in our Portkey comparison →
What is Portkey Gateway (self-hosted)? →86sovereignty - 4
OpenRouter
CommercialOne key, hundreds of models, nothing to run — the honest hosted pick.
No subscription — pay-as-you-go per token at provider rates plus a small margin. Some free models are available. · in our Portkey comparison →
What is OpenRouter? →32sovereignty
Is it free?
The free tier, its real limits and where you start paying — read from each vendor's own pricing page and dated.
Run these yourself
What each one actually needs — real RAM, honest running cost, and the setup time nobody quotes.
- Self-hosting LiteLLM 2 GB
- Self-hosting Helicone 8 GB. The all-in-one container runs the web dashboard, the Jawn API and proxy, PostgreSQL, ClickHouse and MinIO together, and ClickHouse's own sizing guide says total memory should not go below 8 GB.
Replacing a specific tool?
Head-to-head comparisons for each popular llm gateways & routing product.
Straight head-to-heads
Two llm gateways & routing tools, side by side — verified facts and a plain verdict.