Comparison
LLM Gateway vs Model Router
LLM Gateway and Model Router are both common AI/LLM terms but cover different ideas. Here is a quick side-by-side.
When you would reach for LLM Gateway
When you use multiple providers, need per-tenant cost attribution, or want centralized observability/PII policies.
LiteLLM proxy fronting OpenAI, Anthropic, and Bedrock with unified billing dashboards and automatic retry-on-fallback.
When you would reach for Model Router
Cost-sensitive applications with diverse query difficulty. Skip for narrow, uniformly hard workloads.
A support bot routing FAQ-style queries to Haiku ($0.25/Mtok) and complex multi-step ones to Sonnet ($3/Mtok); avg cost drops 70%.
Frequently asked
What is the difference between LLM Gateway and Model Router?
LLM Gateway: An LLM gateway is a proxy layer that sits between application code and one or more LLM providers — handling auth, rate-limit retries, cost tracking, observability, prompt caching, model routing, and PII redaction. Model Router: A model router picks the cheapest model that's likely to handle a given request well — based on a small classifier, embedding similarity, or rule-based filters — so you don't pay frontier prices for trivial queries.
When should I use LLM Gateway vs Model Router?
When you use multiple providers, need per-tenant cost attribution, or want centralized observability/PII policies. Cost-sensitive applications with diverse query difficulty. Skip for narrow, uniformly hard workloads.
Are LLM Gateway and Model Router the same thing?
No. LLM Gateway is infrastructure; Model Router is infrastructure. They are related but address different parts of the AI stack.