Top LLM Gateways in 2025: Why Requesty Sits Unrivalled at #1

Why an LLM Gateway Matters

Running several Large-Language-Model providers in production means juggling API quirks, rate limits, outages and budgets. Gateways abstract that pain with a single endpoint that adds smart routing, health-aware fail-over, caching and observability. requesty.aihelicone.ai

TL;DR — 6-Way Snapshot (Requesty + 5 challengers)

1. Requesty — The Gold Standard

Always-On Architecture

• Multi-provider redundancy with real-time health probes and sub-50 ms fail-over keeps apps online even when OpenAI or Claude blip. requesty.ai

• Intelligent queuing & exponential back-off remove 429 headaches. requesty.ai

Autopilot Optimisation

• Smart Routing analyses each prompt (code, reasoning, summarisation, etc.) and auto-selects the cheapest viable model that meets the quality bar. docs.requesty.ai

• Weighted Load-Balancing & A/B: define % splits or weights per model for experimentation. docs.requesty.ai

• Fallback Policies chain models so a timeout on GPT-4o instantly retries Gemini 2.5, keeping UX snappy. docs.requesty.ai

Cost-Weaponry

• Cross-provider Auto-Caching — cache a GPT-4o answer and serve it to Claude if content matches, slicing token bills up to 80 %. docs.requesty.airequesty.ai

• Per-key limits (req, token, $) stop bill-shock before it starts. docs.requesty.ai

Developer Joy

• Drop-in with the OpenAI SDK by swapping base_url to https://router.requesty.ai/v1 — no code rewrites. docs.requesty.ai

• Rich request-metadata & feedback API lets front-end users rate answers and pipes that signal straight into the dashboard for RLHF loops. docs.requesty.ai

2. Helicone Gateway

Rust core delivers 8 ms P50 overhead and horizontal scale. PeakEWMA load-balancing, distributed rate-limits and first-class Helicone dashboards make it formidable for latency-sensitive workloads. Drawback: you still manage keys/billing separately, and no pass-through billing yet.

3. OpenRouter

Instant SaaS onboarding and hundreds of ready models; pay the vendor price via pass-through billing. The trade-off is a flat 5.5 % markup and no self-host/edge option, plus routing order is static rather than performance-aware.

4. Portkey

Best-in-class guardrails (prompt-injection, PII scrub, model whitelist) and SOC-2/HIPAA posture. Virtual keys let each team share one physical key safely. Complexity and pricing tiers ($49 +) mean slower lift-off.

5. LiteLLM

Open-source router with least-busy, latency, cost and custom strategies plus 15 + telemetry integrations. Every request spawns resource-heavy workers (≈50 ms), and YAML/Redis plumbing demands seasoned engineers.

6. Unify AI

Clean UI and pass-through billing for basic provider swaps, but no load balancing or deep observability, so scaling past MVP stage is tough.

Which Gateway Should You Pick?

Conclusion

All modern gateways unify APIs and add fallbacks, but Requesty uniquely blends bullet-proof reliability, real-time cost governance and plug-and-play dev-experience. If your roadmap demands both enterprise uptime and CFO-friendly bills, Requesty warrants the pole position in 2025.