OpenRouter
One API for hundreds of language models
OpenRouter is profiled here as a LLM tool for engineering teams. Read about features, pricing, and how it compares to related options in the tools directory.
Description
OpenRouter is a unified LLM gateway founded in 2023 by OpenSea co-founder Alex Atallah with Louis Vichy. A single OpenAI-compatible endpoint and one billing account route requests to hundreds of models from dozens of providers, so switching models means changing one string in a request body. Routing logic responds to provider outages and price or latency preferences automatically. The catalog spans frontier labs, open-weight hosts, and specialized providers, with new models typically listed within hours of release. Public rankings show which models real applications route traffic to each week.
Key Capabilities:
OpenAI-compatible chat completions across all listed models
Automatic provider fallbacks and uptime-aware routing
Unified billing with pay-as-you-go credits
Free model variants for prototyping
Bring-your-own-key support for direct provider accounts
Usage analytics and public model leaderboards
Alternative tools
- Kong AI Gateway
AI traffic governance built on the Kong gateway
- Eden AI
One API for many AI models across providers and modalities
- Reka
Multimodal models that reason across text, image, and video
- Moonshot AI
Open-weight Kimi models tuned for agentic and coding tasks
- xAI Grok
Grok model family with real-time search through one API
- LLM Guard
Open-source security toolkit for LLM interactions