Cloudflare AI Gateway vs LiteLLM: LLM Gateways Comparison
Compare Cloudflare AI Gateway and LiteLLM side by side. Both are tools in the LLM Gateways category.
Updated March 10, 2026
The short answer
Choose Cloudflare AI Gateway if core features free with Cloudflare plans—no per-call gateway fees.
Choose LiteLLM if free open-source core with MIT license.
Want to compare Cloudflare AI Gateway and LiteLLM on your own traffic?
Respan lets you trace LLM and agent calls across any model or framework, A/B test prompts on production traffic, and route requests across 250+ models through one gateway. Free tier covers 10K traces per month. Setup in 5 minutes, no credit card.
Quick Comparison
| Category | LLM Gateways | LLM Gateways |
| Pricing | Freemium | Open Source |
| Best For | Cloudflare users who want to add AI gateway capabilities to their existing edge infrastructure | Engineering teams who want an open-source, self-hosted LLM proxy for provider management |
| Website | developers.cloudflare.com | litellm.ai |
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Pros & Cons: Cloudflare AI Gateway vs LiteLLM
- +Core features free with Cloudflare plans—no per-call gateway fees
- +Tightly integrated with Cloudflare global network for low-latency routing
- +One-line integration for major LLM providers
- +Built-in caching, rate limiting, and fallbacks improve reliability
- −Adds 10-50ms proxy latency to every request
- −Lacks token-level tracing and prompt analysis
- −Strict log retention caps require manual management at scale
- −No enterprise governance features like RBAC or audit trails
- +Free open-source core with MIT license
- +Unified interface to 100+ LLM providers
- +18k+ GitHub stars with strong community
- +Trusted by major enterprises
- −Hidden operational costs (USD 200-500/mo infrastructure)
- −Production latency overhead (20-40ms typical)
- −Enterprise features require USD 30k annual fee
- −Operational burden for self-hosting teams
Pricing: Cloudflare AI Gateway vs LiteLLM
- · 100,000 logs/month
- · Core gateway features
- · Caching and rate limiting
- · Basic analytics
- · 1 million logs/month
- · 10M requests included
- · 30M CPU-ms included
- · USD 0.30 per 1M additional requests
- · Custom log retention
- · Advanced features
- · Dedicated support
- · SLA guarantees
- · MIT license
- · Proxy server
- · 100+ LLM APIs
- · Cost tracking
- · Cloud hosting
- · DevOps labor (USD 1.5-2k/mo)
- · Monitoring tools (USD 200-800/mo)
- · Incident response
- · SSO (Single Sign-On)
- · RBAC
- · Team-level budgets
- · Compliance features
When to Choose Cloudflare AI Gateway vs LiteLLM
- Edge caching for AI API calls
- Rate limiting AI usage per user
- Cost management for AI APIs
- Self-hosted LLM gateway for data control
- Standardizing LLM access across teams
- Budget enforcement per team or project
About Cloudflare AI Gateway
Cloudflare AI Gateway is a unified API gateway for AI applications that provides observability, caching, rate limiting, and cost tracking across multiple LLM providers. Available on all Cloudflare plans, the core gateway features are free with no per-call fees beyond the Cloudflare subscription. The platform connects popular providers like Workers AI, Hugging Face, OpenAI, and Anthropic with a single line of code, offering centralized visibility and control. Built into Cloudflare global network infrastructure, AI Gateway provides edge-level caching, request retries, model fallbacks, and analytics. The free tier includes 100,000 AI Gateway logs per month, while the Workers Paid plan starting at USD 5/month provides 1 million logs. In 2026, Cloudflare introduced Unified Billing, allowing customers to pay for third-party model usage directly through Cloudflare invoices. While the platform excels at cost-effectiveness and integration with Cloudflare existing services, it adds 10-50ms of proxy latency, lacks deep AI observability features like token-level tracing, and enforces strict log retention caps that can require manual management at scale.
About LiteLLM
LiteLLM is an open-source AI Gateway developed by BerriAI with 18,000+ GitHub stars, enabling unified access to 100+ LLM APIs through OpenAI-compatible format. Founded as a Y Combinator company with USD 1.6 million in seed funding, LiteLLM is trusted by companies like Rocket Money, Samsara, Lemonade, and Adobe. The platform provides retry and fallback logic, cost tracking, guardrails, and load balancing with MIT licensing for the core proxy. While the open-source version is free, running LiteLLM requires infrastructure costs of USD 200-500 monthly plus DevOps labor, monitoring tools, and incident response. The Enterprise version at USD 30,000 annually adds SSO, RBAC, and team-level budget enforcement. Users praise LiteLLM's unified API interface and security through open-source auditability, but note production complexity with latency overhead (20-40ms) and operational burden for self-hosting.
What is LLM Gateways?
Unified API platforms and proxies that aggregate multiple LLM providers behind a single endpoint, providing model routing, fallback, caching, rate limiting, cost optimization, and access control.
Browse all LLM Gatewaystools →Other LLM Gateways Tools
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