LiteLLM vs OpenRouter: I Used Both. Here's Where Each One Actually Broke. (opens in new tab)

TL;DR LiteLLM and OpenRouter are not competing products - LiteLLM is a self-hosted open-source proxy you run yourself, OpenRouter is a managed cloud aggregator. The comparison only makes sense if you understand which problem you're actually trying to solve LiteLLM's ceiling: SSO and team-level budget enforcement are behind the enterprise license, Redis dependency for distributed rate limiting has a failure mode worth knowing about, YAML config gets unwieldy at scale OpenRouter's ceiling: ever...