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 2026-08-05. They change; this page is checked against them.
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 a price claim has to be checkable. Every rate is published per million tokens beside the provider’s own published rate, so the difference is arithmetic you can do rather than a percentage to trust. Bring your own accounts and you pay your providers directly, exactly as now.
Pricing