LiteLLM Proxy Review 2026

OpenAI-compatible AI gateway for many models, agents, and MCP servers with budgets, keys, routing, and observability.

LiteLLM Proxy is openAI-compatible AI gateway for many models, agents, and MCP servers with budgets, keys, routing, and observability. LiteLLM Proxy places model providers, agents, and MCP servers behind one gateway. Its page advertises an OpenAI-compatible API for 140+ providers and 1,800 models, aliases, load balancing, fallback, automatic routing, virtual keys, secret-manager integration, limits, chargeback, and request-level audit information.

The practical feature set recorded from vendor material includes API for 140+ providers, Routing, balancing, aliases, and fallback, Keys, budgets, limits, and chargeback, Unified MCP access. These capabilities are most relevant for Company-wide model gateway, Controlling spend, Centralizing model and MCP access. Start evaluation with one bounded, repeatable task and a named human reviewer. Measure completion quality, time saved, failure recovery, and how often a person must correct the result. For agentic products, test ambiguous instructions, stale data, permission failures, retries, and cancellation instead of evaluating only a polished demonstration.