LiteLLM Review (2026)
The most widely adopted open-source LLM gateway, MIT licensed with 100+ provider integrations and zero markup on your tokens. The catch is that you operate it, and published enterprise pricing is wildly inconsistent.
Rating
Starting Price
$0 self-hosted
Free Plan
Yes
SDKs & Frameworks
3
Deployment
3
Best For
Teams with engineering capacity that want provider-agnostic routing with no per-token markup, particularly at volumes where a percentage fee on a managed gateway becomes significant.
Last Updated:
10 Things You Should Know About LiteLLM
- 1 The open-source LiteLLM proxy is MIT licensed and free to self-host, modify and deploy commercially
- 2 It supports 100+ provider integrations behind an OpenAI-compatible interface
- 3 There is no markup or transaction fee on tokens in the open-source tier
- 4 Typical production infrastructure is estimated at $200 to $500 per month depending on traffic and redundancy
- 5 Small deployments can run on a $20 to $50 per month VM
- 6 Enterprise SSO is free only up to 5 users
- 7 Third-party enterprise pricing figures conflict, ranging from $250 per month to roughly $30,000 per year
- 8 Releases are frequent, and pinning to stable versions is advised
Pros & Cons
Pros
- ✓ Zero markup on tokens, which at scale is the single biggest cost difference against managed gateways
- ✓ MIT licensed and genuinely open source, with no feature gating on the core proxy
- ✓ 100+ provider integrations, the broadest coverage of any gateway
- ✓ OpenAI-compatible interface means adopting or leaving it is largely a base URL change
- ✓ The de facto standard, so integration examples and community answers are abundant
- ✓ No vendor availability dependency - if you run it, its uptime is your uptime
Cons
- ✕ You operate it - servers, database, monitoring, upgrades and on-call are all yours
- ✕ Frequent releases mean pinning to stable versions is advisable rather than optional
- ✕ Published enterprise pricing is wildly inconsistent across sources, ranging from $250/mo to roughly $30,000/year
- ✕ Enterprise SSO is free only up to 5 users, so identity management becomes a paid concern quickly
- ✕ No built-in evaluation or deep observability - it routes traffic and you pair it with something else
Features
Zero markup is the whole argument
LiteLLM is the most widely adopted open-source LLM gateway, MIT licensed, fronting 100+ provider integrations behind an OpenAI-compatible endpoint.
The decisive property is that it takes no markup on your tokens.
That sounds like a small thing. It compounds indefinitely:
| Monthly provider spend | LiteLLM (self-hosted) | OpenRouter (5.5%) |
|---|---|---|
| $1,000 | ~$1,025 incl. infrastructure | $1,055 |
| $10,000 | ~$10,300 | $10,550 |
| $50,000 | ~$50,500 | $52,750 |
At $50,000 a month you are paying $2,750 extra every month for nothing additional, and OpenRouter offers no volume discounts.
The crossover is easy to reason about. Below a few thousand dollars of monthly spend, a managed gateway’s fee costs less than the engineering time to run your own. Above it, the percentage grows with your business while your infrastructure cost stays roughly flat.
What self-hosting really costs
The honest accounting, because “free” needs qualifying.
Infrastructure is modest - estimates put typical production at $200 to $500 per month depending on traffic and redundancy, and small deployments run on a $20 to $50 VM.
The real cost is ownership. A gateway sits in the request path, so when it fails, your application fails. It needs the same operational seriousness as any other critical infrastructure: monitoring, alerting, someone on call.
Two practical notes:
- Releases are frequent. Pin to stable versions rather than tracking latest, and treat upgrades as scheduled work.
- Enterprise SSO is free only up to 5 users, so identity management becomes a commercial conversation sooner than most teams expect.
The enterprise pricing is unresolvable
We tried and failed, so we are reporting the failure rather than picking a number.
Three sources, three incompatible answers:
- $1,000 plus a $2,500 monthly licence fee - roughly $30,000 annually
- From $250 per month for managed infrastructure, SSO and audit features
- Not published, contact the maintainer
Those cannot all be right, and the spread is more than an order of magnitude. Contact the maintainer directly.
This is the third time on this site that third-party pricing for a tool in this category has turned out to be unreliable - Confident AI’s model changed entirely without coverage catching up, PromptLayer’s figures vary by source, and now this. Treat any pricing table you find for infrastructure tooling as a starting point for a question, not an answer.
Adopting and leaving cost the same
Worth calling out because it is rare.
LiteLLM exposes an OpenAI-compatible interface, so pointing your application at it is a base URL and key change - and pointing it somewhere else afterwards is the same change in reverse.
Most infrastructure is far cheaper to adopt than to leave. This symmetry is unusual and genuinely valuable, and it makes a sensible migration path practical: prototype on a managed gateway like OpenRouter, move to self-hosted LiteLLM once volume makes the percentage fee uncomfortable. Neither step is a rewrite.
It routes, it does not evaluate
LiteLLM handles routing, retries, fallbacks, load balancing, per-key budgets and rate limits, and cost tracking across providers.
It is not an evaluation platform, and its observability is thinner than a dedicated tool. The normal architecture is LiteLLM in the request path, Langfuse or Logfire receiving traces, and an eval framework alongside.
That is a reasonable stack rather than a gap. A gateway that also tried to be an eval platform would likely be mediocre at both - which is close to the criticism of Portkey, whose open-source gateway is good but whose meaningful logging, traces and analytics require the managed tier.
The difference between the two is where the paywall sits. Portkey gates observability out of its open-source build; LiteLLM has no equivalent gating on the proxy and simply expects you to bring your own.
Should you use it?
Use LiteLLM if you have engineering capacity, you want provider-agnostic routing with no per-token markup, and your spend is high enough that a percentage fee matters.
Don’t use it if you have no operational capacity - a gateway you cannot keep up is worse than a managed one - or your spend is small enough that 5.5% is cheaper than the time.
Bottom line: the default choice, and correctly so. MIT, no markup, broadest provider coverage, and as easy to leave as to adopt. Budget an owner rather than a licence, pin your versions, and pair it with real observability.
License, provider coverage and architecture verified against project documentation on 3 August 2026. Enterprise pricing figures conflict irreconcilably across third-party sources and are reported as unresolved rather than stated. This is a researched directory entry - we have not yet instrumented this gateway with our reference application.
Pricing Plans
Open source
$0
- MIT licensed
- 100+ provider integrations
- No markup and no transaction fees on tokens
- You pay only for infrastructure
Enterprise
Not reliably published
- SSO/SAML, audit logs and SLAs
- SSO is free only up to 5 users
- Third-party figures range from $250/mo to roughly $30,000/year
- Verify directly with the maintainer
SDKs & Frameworks
Deployment
Eval Methods
Billing Unit
Our Verdict
LiteLLM is the default open-source LLM gateway and deserves to be. It is MIT licensed, fronts 100+ providers behind an OpenAI-compatible endpoint, and takes no markup on your tokens - which is the decisive difference at any real volume, because managed alternatives charge a percentage of everything you spend forever. Adopting it is largely a base URL change, and so is leaving, which is an unusually honest position for infrastructure to be in. The cost is operational rather than financial. You run the proxy, the database, the monitoring and the upgrades, which realistically means a few hundred dollars a month of infrastructure and a person who owns it. Releases are frequent enough that pinning to stable versions is advisable. The one genuinely unsatisfying part is enterprise pricing, where third-party sources disagree so wildly - from $250 a month to around $30,000 a year - that none of them can be trusted, and enterprise SSO being free only up to five users means identity management turns into a commercial conversation sooner than you might expect.
Similar Tools
Cloudflare AI Gateway
Teams already on Cloudflare who want caching, rate limiting and cost visibility at the edge with no markup, and who have separate tooling for evaluation.
Not Diamond
Teams already running a gateway who want smarter per-request model selection without putting another vendor in the request path, particularly for coding agents where model spend is high and uncontrolled.
OpenRouter
Small teams and prototypes trying many models without wanting infrastructure, and anyone whose monthly provider spend stays below roughly $5,000 where the markup costs less than running a gateway.
Portkey
Teams that want one gateway to route, cache, budget and guardrail across many LLM providers, and are fine paying for the managed tier once they need real observability
Frequently Asked Questions
How much does zero markup actually save?
It scales with your spend, which is exactly why it matters. LiteLLM takes no markup, so on $1,000 a month of provider spend you pay $1,000 plus infrastructure - roughly $1,025 total on a small VM. OpenRouter charges 5.5% with no volume discounts, so the same $1,000 costs $1,055, and at $50,000 a month it costs $2,750 extra every month with nothing additional delivered. The crossover is straightforward. Below a few thousand dollars of monthly spend, a managed gateway's fee is less than the cost of the engineering time to run your own. Above it, the percentage compounds indefinitely while your infrastructure cost stays roughly flat.
What does self-hosting actually involve?
Servers, a database, monitoring, load balancing, upgrades and on-call. Estimates put typical production infrastructure at $200 to $500 per month depending on traffic and redundancy, with small deployments viable on a $20 to $50 VM. The financial cost is modest; the real cost is ownership. A gateway sits in the request path, so when it fails your application fails, which means it needs the same operational seriousness as any other critical infrastructure. Releases are also frequent, so pin to stable versions rather than tracking latest, and treat upgrades as scheduled work.
Why is the enterprise pricing so unclear?
We could not resolve it and we are not going to publish a figure we do not trust. One source puts Enterprise at $1,000 plus a $2,500 monthly licence fee, around $30,000 annually. Another cites Enterprise from $250 per month for managed infrastructure, SSO and audit features. A third states plainly that enterprise pricing is not published and requires contacting the maintainer. Those cannot all be right, and the spread is more than two orders of magnitude at the low end. Contact the maintainer directly. What we can confirm is that enterprise SSO is free only up to 5 users, so identity management becomes a paid conversation faster than most teams anticipate.
Does it lock me in?
Less than almost anything else in this category. LiteLLM exposes an OpenAI-compatible interface, so pointing your application at it is a base URL and key change, and pointing your application somewhere else afterwards is the same change in reverse. That symmetry is unusual and worth valuing - most infrastructure is much cheaper to adopt than to leave. It also makes a common migration path practical, where teams prototype on a managed gateway like OpenRouter and move to self-hosted LiteLLM once volume makes the percentage fee uncomfortable.
Do I still need an observability tool?
Yes. LiteLLM routes traffic, tracks cost and enforces budgets and rate limits per key. It is not an evaluation platform and its observability is thinner than a dedicated tool. The normal architecture is LiteLLM in the request path with Langfuse, Logfire or similar receiving the traces, and an eval framework alongside. That is a reasonable stack rather than a gap - a gateway that also tried to be an eval platform would probably be mediocre at both, which is roughly the criticism levelled at Portkey, whose open-source gateway is good but whose meaningful observability requires the managed tier.
LiteLLM or Portkey?
Both are open-source gateways and the difference is where the paywall sits. Portkey's gateway is Apache 2.0 and self-hosts free, but meaningful logging, traces, analytics and retention are not in the open-source build - you move to managed or run your own logging stack. LiteLLM is MIT with no equivalent gating on the proxy itself, and expects you to bring your own observability from the start. If you want one product covering routing and observability and are willing to pay for the managed tier, Portkey. If you want the routing layer to be free and unopinionated and you already have observability, LiteLLM.