OmniRoute

What is OmniRoute?

OmniRoute is an open source AI gateway that puts a single OpenAI-compatible endpoint in front of 350+ LLM providers and 1,200+ models, including Claude, GPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, Kimi, and Qwen. It runs locally on your machine — the default is localhost:20128/v1 — and any tool that speaks the OpenAI API format can point at it instead of a single vendor.

What is OmniRoute best for?

OmniRoute is aimed at developers who bounce between AI coding tools and keep hitting rate limits or blowing through free quotas. It stitches many providers — including 90+ with free tiers — into one endpoint with automatic fallback, so Claude Code, Cursor, Cline, OpenCode, and GitHub Copilot can all draw from the same pool of keys and keep working when any one provider runs dry.

What can OmniRoute do?

• Expose one OpenAI-compatible API (with Claude, Gemini, and Responses API translation) across 350+ providers and 1,200+ models.
• Route with 19 strategies — priority, round-robin, cost-optimized, fusion, pipeline, and more.
• Fall back automatically in tiers: your subscription, then API keys, then cheap models, then free ones.
• Compress prompts to cut 15–95% of eligible tokens (≈89% average on tool-heavy coding sessions) via a stacked RTK + Caveman + LLMLingua-2 pipeline.
• Self-heal with circuit breakers, connection cooldowns, and per-model lockout so a failing provider is skipped, not retried into the ground.
• Ship a built-in MCP server (100+ tools), an A2A agent protocol, an 80+ command CLI, and opt-in memory and guardrails.
• Install as an npm package, Docker image (AMD64/ARM64), Electron desktop app, PWA, or on Android via Termux.

Where does OmniRoute fall short?

It is developed largely by a single primary maintainer (with community contributions), and independent reviewers note that its guardrails fail open and encryption is opt-in — so it is not recommended for production or compliance-sensitive workloads without extra hardening.

The project is young and moves fast: provider counts, routing-strategy counts, and free-token figures shift release to release, and the free-tier “budget” depends on third-party providers that can change or revoke access at any time. Treat the headline numbers as a moving target, not a guarantee.

It is also built for a specific job — routing coding agents across many providers — rather than as a neutral, enterprise-grade proxy. If you want a mature gateway with formal support and a longer track record, a project like Bifrost may fit better.

Is OmniRoute free?

Yes. OmniRoute is MIT-licensed and free to run, with no paid tier — you self-host it and bring your own provider keys. The pitch is that it also unlocks a large monthly pool of free tokens (the project cites roughly 1.5 billion) by aggregating dozens of keyless or free-forever providers, though that supply comes from third parties, not OmniRoute itself.

What does OmniRoute replace?

OmniRoute is a self-hosted stand-in for hosted routing services like OpenRouter and Cloudflare AI Gateway. Instead of sending every request through someone else’s managed proxy and paying a markup, you run the gateway yourself, keep your keys and history on your own machine, and control routing, fallback, and caching directly.

FAQ

Is OmniRoute open source? Yes. OmniRoute is released under the MIT license and its source is on GitHub. It began as a fork of the earlier 9router project.

Can I self-host OmniRoute for free? Yes — it is free and designed to run on your own machine (npm, Docker, or a desktop app). Your keys, usage, and history stay local rather than in a vendor’s cloud.

Is OmniRoute a good OpenRouter alternative? For local development it can be: you get one OpenAI-compatible endpoint across many providers plus routing and fallback, without a hosted markup. For production or team use, OpenRouter’s managed reliability and support may still be the safer choice.

What do I need to run OmniRoute? Node.js for the npm install, or Docker; there are also Electron desktop builds and a PWA. You supply your own provider API keys (many free tiers need no card), and it listens on port 20128 by default.