---
title: LLM gateway comparison 2026 — OpenRouter vs Helicone vs Portkey vs jusInfer
description: There are four common shapes of LLM gateway in 2026. They look interchangeable from the API surface and aren't. Here's what each is actually optimized for and when to pick which.
tldr: OpenRouter = price-shopping marketplace. Helicone = observability proxy bolted on top of your direct provider keys. Portkey = enterprise routing + guardrails. jusInfer = coding-agent-specific router with per-step model selection. Pick the one whose primary axis matches your highest-pain problem.
date: 2026-05-27
author: jusInfer
cluster: comparison
tags: openrouter, helicone, portkey, jusinfer, gateway-comparison, llm-routing
---

# LLM gateway comparison 2026

"LLM gateway" gets used to mean four different products. Picking the wrong shape is the most common mistake we see — a team installs an observability proxy when they actually needed a router, or installs a router when they actually needed cost telemetry on their existing provider keys.

The four shapes:

| Shape | Example | Optimizes for | What you give up |
|---|---|---|---|
| **Marketplace** | OpenRouter | Lowest-price access to many models | No per-step routing intelligence; pay-per-use markup |
| **Observability proxy** | Helicone | Telemetry, logs, retries on YOUR keys | No price optimization; you still pay the underlying provider directly |
| **Enterprise router** | Portkey | Governance, fallbacks, PII redaction | Heavier setup; priced for orgs not individuals |
| **Coding-agent router** | jusInfer | Per-step model selection for coding workloads | Not optimized for chat, image, embeddings |

## OpenRouter

**What it is**: a marketplace. You send a request specifying a model id (`anthropic/claude-sonnet-4`, `deepseek/deepseek-chat`, etc.); OpenRouter forwards to the cheapest-currently-available provider hosting that model and charges you their price plus a small markup.

**Best for**: getting access to many models behind a single key, especially open-weight models hosted by multiple inference providers (Together, Fireworks, DeepInfra, etc.) where price varies day to day.

**Where it's weak for coding agents**: you still pick the model. OpenRouter doesn't watch your conversation and route an "is this file a JSON config?" question to a small model. If you pin Claude Sonnet in your harness, every step uses Claude Sonnet.

## Helicone

**What it is**: a proxy you point your existing OpenAI/Anthropic SDK at by swapping the base URL. Your keys stay yours; Helicone logs every request, computes per-user cost, exposes a dashboard. Free tier covers a generous quota.

**Best for**: teams that already standardized on a direct provider and want telemetry without changing their billing model.

**Where it's weak**: no price optimization layer. If your bill is $X today with the direct provider, your bill is still $X with Helicone — you just see it itemized. Adding routing requires migrating to a different product class.

## Portkey

**What it is**: an enterprise-shaped router with guardrails (PII redaction, prompt firewalls), multi-provider fallback chains, cost budgets per virtual key, and an audit-log surface.

**Best for**: orgs with a procurement process, compliance requirements, or multi-team budget allocation. The configuration surface is rich because that's what enterprises need.

**Where it's heavier than you want**: for an individual developer or a small team, Portkey's setup-to-value time is longer than the alternatives. The features pay back at scale, not at one-developer scale.

## jusInfer

**What it is**: a router specifically for coding-agent traffic. Same OpenAI-compatible API surface, but the model selection inside the gateway is informed by what a coding loop looks like — short "read this file" turns get cheap models, "rewrite this 400-line function" gets a stronger one, "design this system" gets reasoning-capable.

**Best for**: people running Claude Code, Cursor, Cline, OpenCode, Aider, or any other coding agent and watching their monthly bill grow with usage.

**Where it's weak**: not optimized for image generation, embeddings, fine-tuning, or chat-style consumer products. The per-step routing logic encodes "what does a coding turn look like" — applied to chatbot traffic, it just looks like a regular cheap-by-default proxy.

## Decision matrix

Pick by your highest-pain problem:

| Your pain | Pick |
|---|---|
| "I want access to 100+ models behind one key, even niche open-weight ones" | OpenRouter |
| "My provider bill is fine, but I have no visibility into who's burning the most" | Helicone |
| "Compliance + budgets + multi-team governance is the bottleneck" | Portkey |
| "My coding-agent bill is growing faster than my team" | jusInfer |
| "I want all of the above" | Compose two: Helicone in front of jusInfer, for example. They're not exclusive. |

## What about combining?

You can. Helicone is content-neutral — it'll happily proxy any OpenAI-compatible endpoint, including jusInfer's. Stack order:

```
your harness  →  Helicone (telemetry)  →  jusInfer (per-step routing)  →  underlying provider
```

Your Helicone dashboard shows the request to jusInfer; jusInfer's dashboard shows the routed underlying model. Two layers of visibility, one bill at the bottom.

What you can't usefully stack: two price-optimization layers (OpenRouter behind jusInfer, or vice versa). One of them ends up just being a passthrough that adds latency without changing the routed model.

## Honest weaknesses of each (we've used all four)

- **OpenRouter** — quality varies day to day as it shifts between sub-providers. Fine for batch, occasionally surprising for interactive coding.
- **Helicone** — sampling at scale needs paid plan; free tier hits limits quickly under heavy agent traffic.
- **Portkey** — config-as-data is powerful but takes a day to internalize for a new user. Not a "5-minute install."
- **jusInfer** — narrower scope; if your workload is 50% coding agents and 50% something else, the savings only land on the coding half.

## When the right answer is "none, go direct"

Three cases:
1. You're under $20/month of inference — gateway cost (free or otherwise) is solving a problem you don't have.
2. You're locked to one model intentionally (a research project measuring one specific model's behavior).
3. Your tooling doesn't support custom base URLs (rare in 2026; even Cursor and Copilot have it now).

## Further reading

- [Cheapest LLM API for coding 2026](/blog/cheapest-llm-api-for-coding-2026) — narrower per-model price comparison
- [OpenRouter alternatives 2026](/blog/openrouter-alternatives-2026) — what to pick if OpenRouter isn't fitting
- [Together vs Fireworks vs jusInfer](/blog/together-vs-fireworks-vs-jusinfer) — inference provider comparison (different layer)