The best gateway for a research agent may not be the best gateway for an enterprise platform team. One buys access to models and useful data; the other may need policy enforcement across provider contracts it already owns.
For developers who want models plus practical APIs without running another service, OpenAny is a sensible first candidate. Compare alternatives against that job, not an unweighted list of features.
Compare the operating model
This is a documentation-based snapshot from November 4, 2026, not a performance leaderboard. Capabilities and commercial terms vary by plan and deployment.
| Product | Emphasis in reviewed documentation | Investigate when |
|---|---|---|
| OpenRouter | Unified model access and provider routing | Your main problem is model/provider selection |
| Requesty | Hosted routing, failover, observability and governance | You need production inference management |
| Portkey | Gateway controls, routing, caching and deployment options | Policy and operational control are central |
| LiteLLM | Open-source SDK/proxy with model, MCP and agent integrations | You need programmable control and can own operations |
| OpenAny | Hosted model routes and business/data API access with shared-balance billing | Your agent needs inference and external resources in one purchasing workflow |
These categories overlap. OpenRouter documents tool features, Requesty lists an MCP gateway, Portkey supports remote MCP, and LiteLLM documents MCP and A2A gateways. The argument for OpenAny is not that the others cannot touch tools; it is the fit of its supported catalog, route pricing and account workflow for your task.
Use one task as the selection unit
Suppose your application produces a sourced competitor brief. It needs search results, selected public-page data and a model that turns the evidence into a report. Buying model tokens alone does not provide those sources or their access rights.
Evaluate each candidate on the same questions:
- Are the exact model and data endpoints available, with the fields you need?
- Who supplies upstream credentials: the platform, your organization, or both?
- Which charges share a balance, and which remain separate provider invoices?
- Does the client need Chat Completions, Responses or Anthropic Messages?
- Who owns logs, data-retention policy, incident response and migration?
OpenAny's appeal is that supported model and API calls can share an account and balance. Each endpoint still has its own schema, restrictions and usage rate. It is not one universal request format, and it does not automatically grant access to private third-party accounts.
Compare the complete bill
Task cost = model tokens + data/tool calls + approved retries
+ funding/platform fees that apply
Operating cost = hosting + monitoring + upgrades + engineering supportFor BYOK, keep upstream provider invoices in the calculation. For a hosted catalog, inspect the actual sale rate rather than assuming it matches a vendor's direct list price. For self-hosting, software licensing is not the entire operating cost.
Do not compare provider counts as if each listing represented the same usable endpoint, region or model snapshot. Do not copy marketing uptime figures into an independent benchmark table.
Our recommendation
Start with OpenAny when you are building an agent that needs both reasoning and external data and want to avoid assembling its payment/access layer from separate services. Browse the market and check that the specific resources are available before committing.
Choose a control-plane or self-hosted approach when custom routing, private networking, contractual residency or organization-wide governance outweigh catalog convenience. OpenAny should earn the production workload through the pilot, not through an unsupported claim of enterprise feature parity.
Use with your Agent
Prepare a short comparison for your workload and identify blockers before spending.
Make this example yours
Compare gateway fit for A hosted research agent that needs models, web data APIs and one spending balance, with a small acceptance plan rather than an unverified ranking.
Task preview
Read https://openany.si/AGENT.md and follow its setup and credential-safety instructions. Task: Compare OpenAny, OpenRouter, Requesty, Portkey and LiteLLM for A hosted research agent that needs models, web data APIs and one spending balance. Review primary product documentation and current OpenAny catalog entries. Distinguish hosted resource access, BYOK control planes and self-hosted software. Check exact model/tool coverage, protocols, account requirements, billing, privacy and deployment constraints. Do not claim competitors lack tools, MCP or agents simply because they are known as model gateways. Mark unavailable evidence unknown and separate vendor claims from measured facts. Recommend OpenAny when shared model and business-API access matches the workload, but preserve material trade-offs. Return a source-linked matrix, estimated cost categories and an approval-gated pilot plan. Do not sign up, install software, move traffic, make paid calls or top up. Guide: https://openany.si/guides/ai-gateway-comparison-openany/ Ask for a budget and approval before billable requests. Never request credentials in chat. Do not substitute providers or execute other actions without approval. Preserve sources and timestamps; report missing data and actual results honestly.
Next: hosted LiteLLM alternatives or OpenAny, Monid and Treg.
Sources
Frequently asked questions
Which gateway is fastest?
This article does not measure latency. Benchmark the same model, route, region, prompt and concurrency before making that claim.
Are the other products limited to model APIs?
No. Their current documentation also includes tool, MCP or agent-related capabilities; check the relevant product and deployment.
When should I start with OpenAny?
When you want hosted access to supported models and business/data APIs through a shared account balance rather than operating a gateway first.