About LiteLLM
LiteLLM is an AI gateway, open source, offering one unified interface for calling more than 100 LLM providers, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Bedrock and Azure, using the OpenAI request format. It can be used as a Python SDK inside an application or deployed as a proxy server that serves a whole team or organization. The core is Python with a Rust component, and GitHub lists the license as 'Other'.
The project aims to remove the hassle of handling a separate SDK, login scheme, request format and set of errors for each model. On top of that the gateway provides load balancing, guardrails, spend tracking, virtual keys and an admin dashboard, and it exposes endpoints for chat completions, responses, embeddings, images, audio, batches and reranking.
Because requests keep the OpenAI format, teams can swap providers without rewriting application code. It is self-hosted, with hosted-proxy and enterprise tier options linked in the README, and its topics also reference an MCP gateway and LLMOps. It suits platform and AI engineering teams that need central control over model access, budgets and logging.
Key features
- Unified OpenAI-format interface for 100+ LLMs
- Python SDK and proxy server modes
- Virtual keys and spend tracking
- Guardrails and load balancing
- Built-in admin dashboard
- Endpoints for chat, embeddings, images and audio
Good fit for
- →Central LLM gateway for a team
- →Switching model providers without code changes
- →Tracking spend across LLM usage
- Tags
- ai-gateway
- llm
- openai-compatible
- llmops
- proxy
- python
- load-balancing
- cost-tracking
LiteLLM: questions and answers
- What is LiteLLM used for?
- LiteLLM is an open-source AI gateway and Python SDK that lets you call 100+ LLM providers through one OpenAI-style interface, with spend tracking and load balancing. It is a good fit for central LLM gateway for a team, switching model providers without code changes and tracking spend across LLM usage.
- Is LiteLLM open source?
- Yes. LiteLLM is open source under a custom licence. Its source code is on GitHub at BerriAI/litellm and is written mainly in Python.
- Is LiteLLM free?
- Yes. LiteLLM is open source, so the software itself is free to use under the terms of its own licence. A managed cloud version is also available.
- Can I self-host LiteLLM?
- Yes. LiteLLM can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure.
- What is LiteLLM an alternative to?
- LiteLLM is an open-source alternative to Amazon Bedrock, OpenRouter, Portkey and Azure AI Foundry. Other open-source alternatives to Amazon Bedrock include Portkey AI Gateway, LLM Gateway and Dify.
- Is LiteLLM actively maintained?
- Yes. The most recent commit to LiteLLM was on 2 October 2026, and the latest release is v1.103.2, published on 1 October 2026. The project has 60k stars on GitHub.
Open-source alternatives to LiteLLM
See all
Portkey AI Gateway
AI Infrastructure
A blazing fast AI Gateway with integrated guardrails. Route to 1,600+ LLMs, 50+ AI Guardra
MITvs Amazon Bedrock★ 13k
LLM Gateway
AI Infrastructure
Route, manage, and analyze your LLM requests across multiple providers with a unified API
OSSvs Amazon Bedrock★ 1.7k
New API
AI Infrastructure
A unified AI model hub for aggregation & distribution. It supports cross-converting variou
AGPL-3.0vs OpenRouter★ 49k
Helicone
AI Infrastructure
🧊 Open source LLM observability platform. One line of code to monitor, evaluate, and expe
Apache-2.0vs OpenRouter★ 6.2k
One API
AI Infrastructure
LLM API 管理 & 分发系统,支持 OpenAI、Azure、Anthropic Claude、Google Gemini、DeepSeek、字节豆包、ChatGLM、文心一
MITvs OpenRouter★ 37k
Dify
AI Infrastructure
Build Agentic workflows, RAG pipelines, with rich AI model and tool support on one collabo
OSSvs Gumloop★ 158k
SaaS alternatives to LiteLLM
See all
Amazon Bedrock
AI Infrastructure
Managed AWS service for building generative AI apps with models from several providers
SaaS
OpenRouter
AI Infrastructure
Unified API gateway for accessing many large language models from one endpoint
SaaS
Portkey
AI Infrastructure
AI gateway and observability platform for managing LLM requests
SaaS
Azure AI Foundry
AI Infrastructure
Microsoft platform for building, evaluating and deploying AI apps and agents on Azure
SaaSAI Stats
AI Infrastructure
Database of AI models plus an OpenAI-compatible gateway with usage, pricing and reliability monitoring
SaaS
AllToken
AI Infrastructure
Unified API gateway to LLMs from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google with usage tracking and routing
SaaS

