Overview

Rating

10.0 / 10

Rating

Best For

Enterprises, especially in the EU and regulated industries, that need governed access to LLMs and agents with data residency

Best For

AI engineering teams building production LLM applications who need unified access, observability, and cost control

Product Summary

Orq.ai is an EU-hosted AI gateway and LLMOps platform with routing across 500+ models, tracing, evals, prompt management, and agent governance.

Product Summary

Respan is the AI router with built-in observability and automated evals: one API for 1,000+ models, with tracing, spend control, and evals on every request.

Starting Price

Free to startPer usage-based

Starting Price

Free Trial

Yes

Free Version

Yes

Website

orq.ai

Website

respan.ai

Key features

Core capabilities each platform advertises.

Orq.ai

AI gateway for 500+ models with fallbacks, retries, and load balancing
MCP gateway with tool-level access control and audit logs
Smart Router for per-request model selection by cost and quality
Tracing, online evaluators, and alerts

Respan

One API for 1,000+ models
Automatic fallbacks and retries
Load balancing across providers and models
Exact-match caching with configurable TTL
Hard spend limits per key, per customer, or org-wide
Task-aware model routing with Respan Router (beta)
Tracing, evals, and prompt management on every routed request

Strengths and tradeoffs

What each tool does well, and the limitations to keep in mind.

Orq.ai

Pros

Gateway, observability, evals, prompts, and agent runtime in one platform
EU-hosted by default, with VPC, on-prem, and air-gapped options on Enterprise
Unlimited gateway seats, with usage billed by spans and data

Cons

A platform fee applies to model traffic: 4.5% on Orq credits, 4% on BYOK past 1M requests a month
AI Studio, the UI for prompts, agents, and experiments, costs €35 per seat per month
Enterprise SSO and fine-grained RBAC are a €300/month add-on below Enterprise
VPC and on-prem deployment and a HIPAA BAA require Enterprise

Respan

Pros

Gateway, tracing, and evals in one platform, so every metric ties back to the request behind it
1,000+ models through one OpenAI-compatible API
No processing fee on Respan credits, and provider discounts are passed straight through
Hard spend caps that block requests, not just alert
Unlimited seats on the free plan
SOC 2, HIPAA with a BAA, GDPR, and ISO 27001

Orq.ai or Respan — which should you choose?

Choose Orq.ai if you wantChoose if you want

Governing every LLM and tool call across an enterprise
Meeting EU data residency and EU AI Act requirements
Attributing AI spend by team, project, or customer

Choose Respan if you wantChoose if you want

Keeping agents online through provider outages and rate limits
Controlling LLM spend per customer or API key
Switching models without code changes
Scoring output quality on live production traffic
Replacing a separate gateway, logging tool, and eval tool with one platform

Cons

Additional latency (30-40ms) from routing through a gateway layer
Newer platform with smaller community compared to established tools
Some advanced provider-specific features may not be fully supported

Orq.ai vs Respan (2026)

Overview

Key features

Strengths and tradeoffs

Orq.ai or Respan — which should you choose?

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