Alternatives, honestly compared
8 guides to LLM gateways and inference platforms. Each one lists what the product does well, the complaints we could trace to a source, and the case for OpenKey — 338 models behind one OpenAI-compatible key at provider price + 3%.
OpenRouter alternatives
A universal AI model gateway routing developer requests across 400+ LLMs from 60+ providers through a single OpenAI-compatible API endpoint.
Best for
Developers who want the widest possible LLM selection and provider fallback in one place and can tolerate variable per-provider consistency in exchange for breadth and community-vetted rankings.
LiteLLM alternatives
An open-source LLM gateway/proxy library that lets developers call 100+ LLM APIs using a standardized OpenAI-compatible format, self-hosted or run as a lightweight proxy server.
Best for
Teams with the engineering capacity to self-host and maintain their own gateway who want zero markup and full control over provider routing.
Together AI alternatives
A full-stack 'AI Native Cloud' platform for serverless inference, fine-tuning, and dedicated GPU clusters (H100/H200/GB200/B300) for open-source and frontier models.
Best for
Teams that want owned-infrastructure-grade performance (not just a routing markup) plus fine-tuning and dedicated GPU clusters under one vendor.
Fireworks AI alternatives
An enterprise AI inference platform, built by the ex-Meta PyTorch team, offering per-token serverless inference, dedicated deployments, fine-tuning, and compound AI (multi-step model orchestration).
Best for
Enterprises that need the lowest production latency and a real fine-tune-to-deploy pipeline, and that value a sales-led relationship over self-serve simplicity.
DeepInfra alternatives
A serverless inference provider focused on cost-competitive, high-speed hosting of open-source LLMs and image/video models, billed per-token or per-second.
Best for
Cost-sensitive teams running open-source models at scale who want the lowest per-token price and don't need a free trial tier or bundled fine-tuning pipeline.
AI/ML API alternatives
A unified API platform giving developers access to 500+ models across text, image, video, audio, code, embeddings, and vision through a single OpenAI-compatible endpoint.
Best for
Developers who want one of the broadest text+media model catalogs plus free-tier and startup-credit access, and specifically those who need crypto payment support.
Novita AI alternatives
A San Francisco-based AI cloud platform offering 200+ model APIs (LLM, image, video, audio) plus GPU instances, serverless GPU, and agent sandboxes on one platform.
Best for
Developers who want model APIs and raw GPU/serverless compute in the same account at aggressive prices, and value very granular per-key budget controls.
Eden AI alternatives
A Lyon, France-based AI API aggregation and management platform giving businesses access to 70+ AI technologies and 100+ models (vision, NLP, speech, OCR) from providers like Google, AWS, and OpenAI through one platform.
Best for
Enterprise and non-technical teams that need multi-provider fallback and a no-code workflow builder for vision/NLP/speech/OCR tasks, not generative LLM or media routing.
Deciding between two models instead of two platforms?See the model comparisons