AI · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Arch-Router – 1.5B model for LLM routing by preferences, not benchmarks
Hi HN — we're the team behind Arch (https://github.com/katanemo/archgw), an open-source proxy for LLMs written in Rust. Today we're releasing Arch-Router (https://huggingface.co/katanemo/Arch-Router-1.5B), a 1.5B router model for preference-based routing, now integrated into the proxy. As teams integrate multiple LLMs - each with different strengths, styles, or cost/latency profiles — routing the right prompt to the right model becomes a critical part of the application design. But it's still an open problem. Most routing systems fall into two…
Arch-Router is a 1.5B model that intelligently routes prompts to different large language models based on user preferences rather than task classification. Built by the team behind Arch, an open-source LLM proxy… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Prices are shown for the 2 we have checked on their own sites, 2 of them free or with a free tier.
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Arch▲314Hey HN — I’m Adil from Katanemo (with Salman, Shuguang, and Meiyu) We previously shared an early version of this project as ArchGW. Based on customer feedback, the scope expanded from “LLM routing and model access” into something broader: delivery infrastructure for agentic applications. We renamed it to Plano and reworked the architecture accordingly. The problem On-the-ground AI practitioners will tell you that calling an LLM is not the hard part. The really hard part is delivering agentic applications to production quickly and reliably, then iterating without rewriting system code every…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
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LLM Gatewayfree tier▲296I built an OpenAI-compatible LLM gateway that routes requests to OpenAI, Anthropic, Ollama, vLLM, llama-server, SGLang... anything that speaks /v1/chat/completions. Single Go binary, one YAML config file, no infrastructure. It does the things you'd expect from this kind of gateway... semantic routing via a three-layer cascade (keyword heuristics, embedding similarity, LLM classifier) that picks the best model when clients omit the model field, weighted round-robin load balancing across local inference servers with health checks and failover. The part I think is most…
2025 · llmgateway.io · its alternatives →
- 3RY
Hey HN, we've just finished building a dynamic router for LLMs, which takes each prompt and sends it to the most appropriate model and provider. We'd love to know what you think! Here is a quick(ish) screen-recroding explaining how it works: https://youtu.be/ZpY6SIkBosE Best results when training a custom router on your own prompt data: https://youtu.be/9JYqNbIEac0 The router balances user preferences for quality, speed and cost. The end result is higher quality and faster LLM responses at lower cost. The quality for each candidate LLM is predicted ahead of time…
2024 · unify.ai · its alternatives →
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FastRouter.aifree tier, from $199/mo▲364Route requests to the right LLM for cost, latency & quality
23d ago · fastrouter.ai · its alternatives →
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Hi HN! My name is Adil Hafeez, and I am the Co-Founder at Katanemo and the lead developer behind Arch - an open source project for developers to build faster, generative AI apps. Previously I worked on Envoy at Lyft. Engineered with purpose-built LLMs, Arch handles the critical but undifferentiated tasks related to the handling and processing of prompts, including detecting and rejecting jailbreak attempts, intelligently calling “backend” APIs to fulfill the user’s request represented in a prompt, routing to and offering disaster recovery between upstream LLMs, and managing the observability…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
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We built any-llm because we needed a lightweight router for LLM providers with minimal overhead. Switching between models is just a string change : update "openai/gpt-4" to "anthropic/claude-3" and you're done. It uses official provider SDKs when available, which helps since providers handle their own compatibility updates. No proxy or gateway service needed either, so getting started is pretty straightforward - just pip install and import. Currently supports 20+ providers including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Mistral, and AWS Bedrock. Would love to hear what you think!
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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We built a model router that plugs into coding agents (e.g. Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, etc.) and intelligently sends requests to the best model to serve them. Here's a quick demo of running it locally: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isKhAyivtfM. At Weave, we write most of our code with AI, and it's been getting more expensive. This came to a head when Opus 4.7 was released and, thanks to its tokenizer changes, our costs shot up. We knew we didn't need Opus for everything but we didn't want to lose out on the intelligence for the cases where you really need it. So we decided…
Jun 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Hey HN, We've been building a multi-model API for LLMs called OpenRouter since we launched the Window AI extension in April this year [0]. The events of the last week make it clear the LLM landscape is unpredictable, so LLM aggregators are picking up interest. Unlike others, we're making a router on top of a public, explorable dataset. We recently built a way to rank and visualize this data, including the token counts we see going to and from different models, both open-sourced (like Llama, Mistral, finetunes, and variants) and closed-sourced (OpenAI, Anthropic). The API supports - 50+…
Apr 2026 · openrouter.ai · its alternatives →
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Hi HN! My name is Adil Hafeez, and I am the Co-Founder at Katanemo and the lead developer behind Arch - an open source project for developers to build faster, generative AI apps. Previously I worked on Envoy at Lyft. Engineered with purpose-built LLMs, Arch handles the critical but undifferentiated tasks related to the handling and processing of prompts, including detecting and rejecting jailbreak attempts, intelligently calling “backend” APIs to fulfill the user’s request represented in a prompt, routing to and offering disaster recovery between upstream LLMs, and managing the observability…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
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TensorZero▲307Hi HN! We're Gabriel & Viraj, and we're excited to open source TensorZero. To be a little cheeky, TensorZero is an open-source platform that helps LLM applications graduate from API wrappers into defensible AI products. 1. Integrate our model gateway 2. Send metrics or feedback 3. Unlock compounding improvements in quality, cost, and latency It enables a data & learning flywheel for LLMs by unifying: • Inference: one API for all LLMs, with <1ms P99 overhead • Observability: inference & feedback → your database • Optimization: better prompts, models, inference strategies • Experimentation:…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Hi HN, we built an open source model gateway. It's a single place to manage our own self hosted, frontier, and open source models in one place. It’s is rust native, built for concurrency, and implements all the config quirks across models and providers (streaming formats, tool calls, model parameters, rate limits, and different error behavior). The gateway adds under 1 ms for BYOK requests and under 2 ms when Experiential supplies the provider key. It has every major inference provider, and 1000+ models refreshed daily via a codex agent that opens a PR. Compared to other similar projects…
Aug 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Hey HN! This is Adil, Salman and Jose and and we’re behind archgw [1]. An intelligent proxy server designed as an edge and AI gateway for agents - one that natively know how to handle prompts, not just network traffic. We’ve made several sweeping changes so sharing the project again. A bit of background on why we’ve built this project. Building AI agent demos is easy, but to create something production-ready there is a lot of repeat low-level plumbing work that everyone is doing. You’re applying guardrails to make sure unsafe or off-topic requests don’t get through. You’re clarifying vague…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Self-hosted LLM router. Cost effective, deterministic, and fast. Secure and private by default. - Northwood-Systems/millwright
Jul 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Find the local LLM that actually runs and performs best on your hardware. Ranked by real, recency-aware benchmarks, not parameter count. One command, run it instantly. - Andyyyy64/whichllm
May 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Many teams connecting LLMs to external tools eventually encounter the same architectural issue: as more tools and agents are added, the integration pattern becomes an N×M mesh of direct connections. Each agent implements its own auth, retries, rate limiting, and logging; each tool needs credentials distributed to multiple places and observability becomes fragmented. We built LLM gateway with this goal to provide a single place to manage authentication, authorization, routing, and observability for MCP servers, with a path toward a more general agent-gateway architecture in the future. The…
Dec 2025 · truefoundry.com · its alternatives →
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Hi HN My name is Salman and I work on Arch GW - the intelligent gateway designed to protect, observe, and personalize LLM applications with your APIs. https://github.com/katanemo/arch Our team built Envoy Proxy at Lyft, and re-imagined it with the belief that: Prompts are nuanced and opaque user requests, which require the same capabilities as traditional HTTP requests including secure handling, intelligent routing, robust observability, and integration with backend (API) systems for personalization – all outside business logic. Engineered with purpose-built LLMs, Arch…
2024 · docs.archgw.com · its alternatives →
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Hey HN, With the news of OpenRouter possibly being acquired and proliferation of hosted LLM routers (i.e. Ramp Router, Vercel’s AI Gateway), I saw the need for a self hosted solution focused on cost savings, transparency, and performance. So, I built an open sourced router with a simple CLI interface that can easily sit between coding agents and GenAI workloads. For the curious and lazy, at the moment, Millwright has the tools for, - Providers: OpenAI-compatible APIs, Anthropic, Amazon Bedrock - Routing: policy-controlled model roles (cheap, mid, frontier), cheapest healthy route selection -…
Jul 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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SelfHostLLM▲134A simple calculator that estimates how many concurrent requests your GPU can handle for a given LLM, with shareable results.
2025 · selfhostllm.org · its alternatives →
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IQ Routing▲100Route every LLM call to the cheapest model that holds quality. Chatbots, RAG, agent loops, and finance. Cut spend 40 to 80 percent, measured on our own traffic, live in thirty seconds.
Aug 2026 · iq-routing.com · its alternatives →
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- 22OS
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Hi HN, Matvey, Ildar, Joey, and Dominik here. If you're building LLM agents that use tools, you're probably worried about prompt injection attacks that can hijack those tools. We were too, and found that solutions like prompt-based filtering or secondary "guard" LLMs can be unreliable. Our thesis is that agent security should be handled at the network level between the agent and the LLM, just like a traditional web application firewall. So we built Archestra Platform: an open-source gateway that acts as a secure proxy for your AI agents. It's designed to be a deterministic firewall against…
2025 · archestra.ai · its alternatives →
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The agent-native LLM router for autonomous agents. Every frontier model behind one wallet, <1ms local routing, USDC payments on Base & Solana via x402. - BlockRunAI/ClawRouter
Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →