How this compares
Four routers and the option of calling the providers directly. Each row says which one to pick and why — including the rows where the answer is not this one.
Pick by what you want
Eight things people actually come here deciding between, and the honest answer for each — including the four rows where the answer is another tool.
| What you want | Pick | Why |
|---|---|---|
| 400+ models, and nothing to install | OpenRouter | Five providers and a process to run is a worse answer to that question than a hosted endpoint with no install at all. |
| Hundreds of providers, MCP, token compression, a desktop app | OmniRoute | Their breadth and feature surface are far past this one, and it is free and MIT too. |
| One shared gateway for a whole team, on a VPS | 9router | ShareQuota is a single-user local proxy. Its management API is loopback-only by design. |
| Exactly one provider, and no plans for a second | Their API, directly | A routing layer earns its keep at the second provider. At the first it is one more thing to run. |
| To use the Claude Pro or ChatGPT Plus plan you already pay for | ShareQuota | OpenRouter sells API credits and cannot take a subscription login. This signs in with OAuth and uses the plan you have. |
| One key across Claude Code, Codex and Gemini CLI at once | ShareQuota | Four dialects on one endpoint, and the CLI configs are switched over reversibly — backed up before the first write, restored on disable. |
| The lightest thing that will do the job | ShareQuota | One Go binary, three direct dependencies, no runtime, no container, no account. |
| Nothing about your requests to leave your machine | ShareQuota | There is no server in the middle. Requests go straight to the provider; state is a SQLite file in your data directory. |
Competitor facts read from their own sites on 2026-09-13. They change; this page is checked against them.
Head to head
One page per router
Each of these sets ShareQuota beside one alternative on the same eleven facts, says which to pick for which job, and answers the questions people ask about the pair.
- ShareQuota vs 9routerTwo free, MIT-licensed routers that sign in to the AI plans you already pay for. One is a Node.js service built to be shared; the other is a single binary built to be yours.Read the comparison
- ShareQuota vs OmniRouteThe widest free AI gateway there is, beside the narrowest one that still signs in to your plans. Both are MIT; the difference is what each one chose to be good at.Read the comparison
- ShareQuota vs OpenRouterA hosted marketplace with nothing to install, beside a local binary with nothing to pay. They are not really rivals — one of ShareQuota’s five providers is OpenRouter — but people compare them, so here it is.Read the comparison
- ShareQuota vs claude-code-routerOne is a router for exactly one tool; the other is a router for the plans you own, that happens to serve that tool too. The overlap is real, and so is the difference.Read the comparison
- ShareQuota vs CLIProxyAPIThe closest sibling on this site: both are Go, both are MIT, both turn the logins of the coding tools you already have into an API. The differences are in scope and in shape.Read the comparison
Five providers, and why that is the number
It is the question this product gets most, so here is the arithmetic rather than a slogan. Those five are the ones with subscriptions worth pooling — and OpenRouter is one of them, which is how the long tail is reached. What the number buys is depth: the binary is 157,679 lines of Go under 3,015 race-enabled tests, and the translator layer is pinned to golden fixtures rather than to hope. Breadth without tests is a list, not a feature.
See the architectureThere is no cost row on this page
Because there is nothing here to price. The app is free and MIT, and so are two of the three routers beside it — a cost column would read $0 across most of the row and tell you nothing. What actually costs money is the provider accounts you bring, and you pay those providers directly, exactly as now.
Pricing