Preliminary Pareto 26.10 scores and cost per task on four benchmarks are on the model card. These results may change before final publication, and no composite score is published.
Which LLM gateway should I use?
It depends on your constraint. For data locality, self-host LiteLLM: open source and free, paid for in ops time. For governance and audit, Portkey's Production tier is $49 a month with 100k logged requests. For trying many models with one key, OpenRouter passes provider prices through and charges 5.5% (minimum $0.80) when you buy credits; Requesty adds 5% to model cost instead. If the bill itself is the constraint, Pareto is Unbiased's blended AI model at $0.80 input and $3.20 output per million tokens: it selects frontier and open models for each request and blends their outputs into one answer. Prefer Chat over a gateway catalog? See multi-model AI chat.
Fees and prices as of , from each vendor's pricing page.
The ranking, by constraint
| If your constraint is | Best pick | Fee | The honest catch |
|---|---|---|---|
| Data locality / VPC | LiteLLM | $0 + ops time | free costs ~$1,000/mo in engineer-hours without a platform team |
| Governance, audit, compliance | Portkey | $49/mo flat | visibility does not lower token prices |
| Trying many models, low spend | OpenRouter | 5.5% on credits | the fee scales with spend; catalog choice stays your job |
| Cache-heavy repetitive traffic | Requesty | 5% markup | same percentage-scaling issue past ~$900/mo |
| The bill itself | Pareto | $0.80 / $3.20 per 1M tokens | latency varies by workload; time it on yours |
Preliminary Pareto 26.10 scores and cost per task on four benchmarks are on the model card. These results may change before final publication, and no composite score is published.
Why constraint-first beats feature-first
Feature grids make every gateway look interchangeable. The dollars do not: at $40,000/month of spend, a 5.5% fee costs about $26,400 a year against $588 for a flat control plane, and neither number touches the bigger lever. On our measured four-task workload, sending the work to the right models saved fourteen times what the gateway fee cost. Pick for your constraint, then check the fee, then remember the fee is not the money.
The numbers behind this page
Further reading: the gateway guide (the four types explained), the fee calculator (your spend, every fee structure), and the model card (the benchmark receipts). External references: OpenRouter fee breakdown, Portkey pricing, Requesty pricing, OpenRouter's own provider-variance data, and the Series B coverage.
How to decide in one afternoon
Take the Stack Finder for a constraint-first recommendation (a few quick questions, no account). Then verify: every option on this page speaks the OpenAI-compatible surface, so a real side-by-side on your own traffic is a base-URL swap and an afternoon, not a migration. If Pareto is on your shortlist, its setup guides cover the coding agents, SDKs and chat apps you likely run, including LiteLLM if you keep your proxy, and the use-case recipes walk through CI fixes, batch code migrations and structured extraction end to end. Already calling Pareto through OpenRouter? Going direct adds a flat $10-a-month Personal plan, the Anthropic Messages format and direct support. Whatever you pick, demand published evidence; vendors who publish harnesses can be checked.
The questions people actually search
What is the best LLM gateway in 2026?
Constraint-dependent: LiteLLM for data locality, Portkey for governance, OpenRouter for multi-model exploration, Requesty for cache-heavy traffic, and Pareto when the goal is the lowest bill per completed task without hand-managing model selection. There is no single winner, and any page that names one without asking your constraint is selling something.
Which LLM gateway is cheapest?
Depends on fee basis and volume: compare OpenRouter's 5.5% per credit purchase (min $0.80) and Requesty's 5% token markup with Portkey's $49/month base, which includes 100k logs and bills $9 per additional 100k. Cheapest overall is self-hosted LiteLLM if your ops time is genuinely free.
Is OpenRouter the best gateway?
For prototyping across many models with one key, it is genuinely the best at that job. For production cost control it is a 5.5% fee on top of list prices and model selection stays your job, which is where most of the money actually moves.
Do LLM gateways add latency?
Measurably little for the hop itself: +68ms median time-to-first-token in our published test, with p95 better through the gateway than direct. Heavy per-request routing reasoning on hard tasks is the real cost to ask about, and vendors should publish theirs.
What is the best OpenRouter alternative?
By direction of departure: LiteLLM if you need self-hosting, Portkey if you outgrew the fee at scale, Pareto if the goal is the bill per completed task. Our full comparison covers all of them with fees and user-feedback records.
Compare any two models
List rates and dated competitor measurements: prices and measured bills. Preliminary Pareto 26.10 benchmark costs per task from October 1, 2026 are on the model card. Verbosity: Edition 2.
Try it on one part of your codebase
Set Pareto up in the coding agent you already use and give it a week of real work. Pareto starts at $10 a month.
Read https://unbiased.ai/guides/best-llm-gateway-2026/ and tell me what matters for my setup. If Pareto fits, read https://unbiased.ai/works-with/agent.md, find the coding agent I use on this machine, and set it up to use Pareto. Ask before changing any file, and never ask me to paste my API key into chat.
It asks before changing files and never needs your key in chat. Read the agent runbook
