Compare AI Gateways
The AI infrastructure market is crowded. We believe in being brutally honest about where Forge wins, and where you might be better off using another tool. Use this guide to choose the right gateway for your workload.
When to choose Forge
Forge is built specifically for autonomous agents and high-concurrency developer workloads. We excel when you need to run loops that easily hit single-provider rate limits (HTTP 429). By using our built-in Key Pooling and millisecond failovers, you maintain 100% uptime for your agents without having to maintain your own proxy servers.
When to choose OpenRouter
If you are building a hobby project, exploring new models, or need access to the absolute widest variety of open-source fine-tunes (300+ models), OpenRouter is the undisputed king. We recommend OpenRouter for zero-ops rapid prototyping.
When to choose Portkey
Are you a CISO or working in a highly regulated enterprise? Choose Portkey. They have built the industry standard for strict guardrails, PII masking, SOC2 compliance, and multi-team budget enforcement. Forge is significantly more lightweight by comparison.
When to choose LiteLLM
If your compliance team dictates that data cannot leave your VPC, or you prefer to completely own your infrastructure, LiteLLM is the best open-source solution. Forge is a managed service, whereas LiteLLM gives you the Docker containers to run it yourself.