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 companies and developers building API clients

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

Powers the official SDKs for OpenAI, Anthropic, and others. The de facto gateway interface layer.

Starting Price

Free to startPer usage-based

Starting Price

$0Per month

Free Trial

Yes

Free Version

Yes

Website

orq.ai

Website

stainlessapi.com

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

Stainless

SDK generation
API interface
Type-safe clients

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

Stainless

Pros

Automates SDK dev
Type-safe code
Multi-language

Cons

Requires OpenAPI
Limited customization

Orq.ai or Stainless — 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 Stainless if you wantChoose if you want

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10KFree traces/mo

1,000+Models

5 minSetup

Respan lets you trace LLM and agent calls across any model or framework, A/B test prompts on production traffic, and route requests across 1,000+ models through one gateway.

Try Respan free

Orq.ai vs Stainless (2026)

Overview

Key features

Strengths and tradeoffs

Orq.ai or Stainless — which should you choose?

Compare Orq.ai and Stainless on your own traffic

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