Cloudflare AI Gateway vs Stainless: LLM Gateways Comparison
Compare Cloudflare AI Gateway and Stainless 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 Stainless if automates SDK dev.
Want to compare Cloudflare AI Gateway and Stainless 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 | paid |
| Best For | Cloudflare users who want to add AI gateway capabilities to their existing edge infrastructure | AI companies and developers building API clients |
| Website | developers.cloudflare.com | stainlessapi.com |
| Key Features |
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| Use Cases |
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Pros & Cons: Cloudflare AI Gateway vs Stainless
- +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
- +Automates SDK dev
- +Type-safe code
- +Multi-language
- −Requires OpenAPI
- −Limited customization
Pricing: Cloudflare AI Gateway vs Stainless
- · 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
- · Core features
- · Advanced features
- · Custom
When to Choose Cloudflare AI Gateway vs Stainless
- Edge caching for AI API calls
- Rate limiting AI usage per user
- Cost management for AI APIs
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 Stainless
Stainless automatically generates SDKs from OpenAPI specs. Creates production-quality type-safe SDKs in multiple languages.
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.
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